Share with Thy Neighbors

Peer to peer (P2P) systems are traditionally designed to scale to a large number of nodes. However, we focus on scenarios where the sharing is effected only among neighbors. Localized sharing is particularly attractive in scenarios where wide area network connectivity is undesirable, expensive or unavailable. On the other hand, local neighbors may not offer the wide variety of objects possible in a much larger system. The goal of this paper is to investigate a P2P system that shares contents with its neighbors. We analyze the sharing behavior of Apple iTunes users in an University setting. iTunes restricts the sharing of audio and video objects to peers within the same LAN sub-network. We show that users are already making a significant amount of content available for local sharing. We show that these systems are not appropriate for applications that require access to a specific object. We argue that mechanisms that allow the user to specify classes of interesting objects are better suited for these systems. Mechanisms such as bloom filters can allow each peer to summarize the contents available in the neighborhood, reducing network search overhead. This research can form the basis for future storage systems that utilize the shared storage available in neighbors and build a probabilistic storage for local consumption.