Achieving Peer-to-Peer Telecommunication Services through Social Hashing

Although peer-to-peer (P2P) Internet telephony gains more and more market share, supporting traditional telephony related use cases is an indispensable requirement. However, communication services designed for this purpose are usually traditional circuit-based, and the centralized structure makes it nearly impossible for their deployments in a distributed, unsecure telecommunication environment. This paper proposes an approach for achieving various kinds of communication services on P2P voice over IP (VoIP) systems by building trust and executing supervision through social networks. We present a system architecture design for network topology maintenance and security assurance. Social protocols and social computing are used to study how P2P entities can be efficiently mapped to social networks, and how social functionalities can benefit communication services implementation. To demonstrate the approach feasibility, we exemplify this architecture in P2P VoIP emergency services by using gossiping and membership management techniques. We believe that our proposed approach will be able to support diverse services on P2P VoIP systems with the performance and security guaranteed to compete with centralized telecommunication systems.