Tracerouting peer-to-peer networks

As peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are being developed and deployed on the Internet at a fast pace, the need for a traceroute like mechanism at the application layer surfaces. Such mechanism, once implemented and deployed, will significantly reduce the complexity involved in developing, researching and evolving P2P networks. It will also help users understand how their queries are handled in P2P networks and mitigate their frustration when their queries return nothing. In this paper, we propose and describe AppTraceroute, which is analogous to traditional traceroute but determines the application layer hops and hosts that a query has visited. Meanwhile, we studied the bandwidth consumptions involved when introducing AppTraceroute into pure P2P networks, hybrid P2P networks and structured P2P networks. We have implemented and experimented the concept of AppTraceroute on a structured P2P network, and the results are promising.