Improving Application-level Network Services with Regions

The underlying premise of the Region Project is that the concept of a region should be a new architecture capability in networking. A region is an entity that encapsulates and implements scoping, grouping, subdividing, and crossing boundaries of sets of entities. It is a powerful tool for managing the increasingly complex demands on the Internet and its successors, and thus should be made into an explicit, first-class component of the network architecture. Autonomous Systems and peer-to-peer networks can be viewed as two simple forms of existing regions. In this work, we explore the utility of informing members in one region of the membership of those same entities in different regions. Specifically, we improve peer-to-peer networks with information derived from Autonomous Systems. This thesis makes three notable contributions. Firstly, we provide a general peer-to-peer simulation framework for different optimization schemes. Secondly, we achieve performance improvements in the lookup, caching and replication of peer-to-peer system. Finally, we enhance our overall understanding of regions through the simulation, as well as their utilities to improve system performance. Thesis Supervisor: Karen R. Sollins Title: Principal Scientist