Collaborative Networking in an Uncooperative Internet

Collaborative applications often require peer-to-peer interaction and peer discovery mechanisms. In today’s Internet, Firewall and NAT technology, and a lack of support of IP multicast, have made it very difficult to support such applications. Application Level Gateways and Directory Services can solve these problems to some extent, but have scalability problems and should be used as a last resort. This paper describes our experience with implementing a service called Astrolabe which uses a peer-to-peer epidemic protocol. We show how we solved peer-to-peer communication, auto-configuration, and peer discovery. The resulting Astrolabe service can be used to support the development of other peer-to-peer protocols and applications.