Transcript ppt

ON THE STABILITY OF
SKYPE SUPER NODES
Anat Bremler-Barr
Ran Goldschmidt
Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya
[email protected]
Haifa University
[email protected]
Background:
• VoIP
• P2P Technology
• Proprietary signaling and media protocol
Architecture:
• Based on partially centralized P2P networks
• Two types of peer nodes:
• Regular Clients and Super Nodes
• Super Nodes (SNs):
• Control level – heart of Skype
• Super Nodes = Skype Clients
with good Bandwidth, CPU usage ...
The Role of a Super Node (SN)
• Maintains control information: the IPs of the Skype users
• Each client maintains an SN list  subset of SNs
• SN list is constantly updated
Call Bob
• Client that wishes to use Skype (to call)
picks one SN from the SN list
• Querying the IP of the callee
• SN is defined by (IP,Port)
IP=12.3.2.4,
Port=3
Main goal: Understanding the stability of SNs
• P2P networks have an inherent dynamic nature
• Clients and computers join and leave the network constantly
• Choosing stable SNs is an important task:
• Improve the performance and quality of the P2P network
• Our goal: measure the stability of SNs and understand
how to choose stable SNs
Experiment Methodology
Stage 1: Collecting
10,000 SNs
in 15 minutes
Stage 2: Ping each
SN every 15 minutes
for 3 months
UDP packet of
Skype login
Harvesting of SNs: Using the SN list
- version 2.5 holds a list of 200 SNs
Absolute Availability
• Absolute Availability = the percentage of time the SN is up during the test
18% -16 days
• Low: 50% of the SNs are available less than 18% of the test time, < 16 days
Number of Sessions of SN
• A session is the continuous period of time the node is up.
• 40% of the SNs have one session!
MSLT vs SSLT

We define two group of SNs:
o
o
Single Session in Life Time (SSLT)
Multiple Sessions in Life Time (MSLT)

We analyze the different characteristics of the two groups

We play “what if” game and show the stability of the
system if we take SNs only from one group (SSLT or
MSLT)
Residual life
Residual life time - time elapsed between the harvesting of the SN until the
end of its last session
1.75
67.5
• SSLT (one session) : median of residual life is 1.75 days
• MSLT (multi session) : median of residual life is 67.5 days
First Session Length
• SSLT (one session) : median of session is 1.75
• MSLT (multi session) : median of session is 4.35
Surprise ! Super Nodes in SSLT have only one session and a shorter one…
The impact on the System: Churn
• Churn measures the number of times an SN goes down and
we need to replace the SN.
• Assumption: system maintains a fixed number of SNs
• When an SN fails, the system picks another one to replace it.
• When an SN fails and then recovers, the SN is like a new SN.
Result:
SSLT: 0.35 turnovers per day
MSLT: 0.22 turnovers per day
The impact on the System: Accessibility
• Accessibility: the probability that an SN is alive as a function of time
• If an SN fails and then recovers, the SN is viewed as a node that
never failed.
• Impact: The lower accessibility value the higher the update rate of the
SN list
Skype Accessibility
• The SNs are distributed over the world  good accessibility.
• The SNs in the SN list are also distributed over the world.
50
Percentage of SNs(10,000)
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
Others
Asia
Europe
North America
SSLT and MSLT Summery
• A huge difference between the characteristics of SSLT
and MSLT SNs
• Choosing SNs from the MSLT group would improve the
churn and accessibility of the P2P system dramatically
Why SSLT and MSLT are so different ?
Our Answer: Static vs. Dynamic IPs
• SSLT = dynamic IPs
• Residential users: Cable, xDSL…
• The address is changed from time to time (or between sessions)
• SN died since the IP address of the SN was replaced
• Good chance that this SN is alive but with a different IP address
• MSLT = static IPs
• SN can leave and return with the same IP
• Servers or academic networks  high availability  good
infrastructure  longer session
Classifying SNs according to
the address type
Classifying using DNS
information
• The vast majority 84.92% of the static IP SNs belongs to the
MSLT group
• The dynamic IPs group shows weaker correlation with only
61.45% of the SNs belongs to SSLT group
• We think that this is due to “Sticky Dynamic IPs” – DHCP technology
• Client that is disconnected from the network returns to its old IP if the break
is short
Related Work
•
•
Our work: Skype Super Nodes
Most previous work: on file transfer
Check: correlation
between ICMP
and Skype Ping
Skype:
application is on all the time the computer is on
File transfer: application is on only when performing file transfer
File Transfer
Skype
Session
Short (hours)
Long (days)
Dynamic
Application impact
Computer impact
(IP address type effect)
Summary & Practical Implication
Practical implication: choosing SNs with static IPs  stable P2P network
Note: Classifying the IP is an easy task for the P2P application.
The high stability of static IPs is due to two reasons:
1. Static IPs do not change the IP address - Impact the Accessibility
2. Computers with static IPs are more stable computers - Impact the Churn