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