A Tutorial on Gnutella, Bittorrent and Freenet Protocols

Author: Chibuike Muoh

email: cmuoh@kent.edu homepage: www.cs.kent.edu/~cmuoh

Prepared for Prof. Javed I. Khan

Department of Computer Science, Kent State University
Date: May 2006

Abstract:

Peer-to-Peer networks are popular applications in content-sharing networks because they provide
better scalability and fault tolerance than the client/server model of computing. The P2P model of
computing has many applications in distributing processing, remote collaboration networks and
communication networks but for the purpose of this survey we only consider P2P protocols that
allow peers to share and access resources. In particular we examine the protocols of popular peer
networks of Gnutella, Bittorrent, and Freenet. For each system examined we concentrate on the
underlying principles and examine how sharing of resources is achieved using its protocol.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
1.1 What is P2P?
1.2 Impact of P2P today
1.3 Criteria for evaluating P2P systems
2. P2P applications looked at
2.1 Gnutella
2.2 Bittorrent
2.3 Freenet
3. Conclusion
4. References
4.2 Research groups
5. Scope of this survey

1.����� INTRODUCTION

1.1���� What is Peer-to-Peer?

Peer-to-peer can be described as a network of cooperating peers that work together to complete
tasks and access resources in the network. Peer systems are scalable and fault tolerant in their
approach because they offer no single points of failure, and the network can grow and shrink
without sacrificing the functionality of the system. Some of the more interesting points on the
desirability of P2P system are:

 Ad-hoc and dynamic membership allows the P2P systems to be self organizing and can
easily scale up/down as the number of peers can grow
 Better bandwidth utilization since the peers communicate directly with each other
  Fault tolerant since no one node is more important the other
 Richness and diversity in services/resource available in the network

1.2���� Impact of P2P today

Although P2P has several applications but by far the most popular application of P2P system is in
content sharing networks which is the main focus of this survey. Current statistics from
CacheLogic, an internet services company show that P2P traffic makes up about 50%-65% of the
downstream traffic for major ISPs and 75%-90% of their upstream traffic [13].

Figure 1.2.1: Internet protocol trends (Source: David

[11])

1.3���� Criteria for evaluating P2P systems

P2P systems can generally be broken down into two broad classes [1][12]; Pure and Hybrid P2P
systems. In pure P2P peers act as both clients and servers in the network, they are thoroughly
decentralized; nodes have equal role/capability and peer communication is symmetric. Pure P2P has
the advantage that they are truly dynamic and less vulnerable to downtown time since there is no
critical component. Hybrid P2P system differs in its use of central severs or �super nodes� for the
sole purpose indexing of the resources or allocating tasks in the system. This allows it to offer better
performance than pure system at the expense of being limited by the availability of the indexing
servers. Peers in the hybrid system are still responsible for hosting the resources on the network and
can directly contact other peers to initiate access to remote resource.
 Figure 1.3.1: Pure P2P network (Source Figure 1.3.2: Hybrid P2P network (Source [17]
[17])

2.����� P2P APPLICATIONS LOOKED AT

P2P computing is a fast evolving field and over its history there have been several variation and
approaches to implementing peer computing. First there was Napster, a music sharing file network
that brought the use of P2P technology into the lime light. The Napster system was unique at its
time because it allowed peers to download music files directly from other peers on the network
(which had very strongly connected components). Sadly though, the history of Napster was abrupt
(Sept. � Dec 1999) due to legal issue of copyright violations that virtually forced the network out
of existence.

Though Napster�s history was short it had a huge impact on the way people used the internet
(being the dominant P2P applicant in existence at the time) and also popularize the whole P2P
movement. Subsequent P2P file sharing application started to appear after its fall (e.g. Kazaa, Ares,
Morpheus etc.) and they sought to avoid the pitfalls of the Napster protocol by making their
operations more decentralized in order to avoid legal liabilities, but no single one of them have been
able to maintain dominance compared to Napster although it is important to point out that the
volume of the P2P on the internet has increase significantly over the years (figure 1.2.1).

For this survey, we examine the Gnutella, Bittorrent, and Freenet protocols, which are some of the
most dominant P2P protocols for content networks [13] in terms of their approach to the P2P
concept and popularity on the internet. Gnutella represents one of the first systems that gained huge
following after the downfall of Napster, its simple but scalable design and its distributed nature
allowed it avoid the legal pitfalls that plagued other more centralized networks.

Following from the original Gnutella model, other peer networks have adopted its concept and
applied it in different ways (e.g. E-Donkey, Aires, Morpheus) but Freenet represents a significant
evolution of the original Gnutella network model; it make security and anonymity of peers central
components of the network (a feature which was �missing� from the original Gnutella protocol).
Also Freenet is significant for this survey because its enhancements to the basic search mechanism
in Gnutella made locating data in the network was more efficient without have to result in a
centralized model by introducing indexing servers.

The choice of Bittorrent for this paper is made clear both the popularity of Bittorrent networks in
content sharing and its radical approach to effectively apply fairness principles in peer networks; no
other popular network models known to efficiently and effectively apply fairness rules in P2P while
maintaining �high levels of robustness and resource utilization� [5].

2.1���� Gnutella

First developed by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper of Nullsoft (later acquired by AOL) in 2000 and
released under the GPL license the Gnutella protocol presents a simple framework for sharing files
on the internet that is scalable and robust.

Gnutella falls into the class of pure P2P; peers in the network are joined by point-to-point
connections to a set of neighboring peers to form an unstructured overlay. These point-to-point
connections in Gnutella are maintained using predefined messages described by the Gnutella
protocol (table 1). In order to join the Gnutella P2P network a peer has to contact a known member
of the network and request to establish a Gnutella protocol connection to the remote peer, once
connected to the network new peers learn about other nodes through the protocol message they
receive from the network.

Initial discovery of known peers in the network is not part of the protocol definition, (though some
out-of-network means such as downloading a predefined list of known peers from a server are
popular methods). Once a Gnutella peer obtains an address for at least one known peer in the
Gnutella network to try to initiate a TCP/IP connection, and next a Gnutella protocol connection
request string is sent over the connection to the remote peer to establish the Gnutella connection.
The connection string is in the form �GNUTELLA CONNECT/<protocol version
string>\n\n� where the <protocol version string> is an ACII string indicating the protocol version
number the requesting peer is using. The remote host replies with �GNUTELLA OK\n\n� if it
wishes to accept incoming connection. A peer joining the network shares an area in its local storage
by creating an inverted list of files that are contained in the share space and evaluates queries it
receives from the network against the inverted list.

Type Description Contained information

Ping Used to actively discover hosts on the None
network. A peer receiving a Ping
descriptor is expected to respond with one
or more Pong descriptors.
Pong The response to a Ping. Includes the IP address and port number
address of a connected Gnutella peer and of the responding peer;
information regarding the amount of data number and total kB of files
it is making available to the network. shared
Query The primary mechanism for searching the Minimum network bandwidth
distributed network. A peer receiving a of responding peer; search
Query descriptor will respond with a criteria
QueryHit if a match is found against its
local data set.
QueryHit The response to a Query. This descriptor IP address, port number,
provides the recipient with enough and network bandwidth of
information to acquire the data matching responding peer; number of
the corresponding Query. results and result set
Push A mechanism that allows a firewalled peer Peer identifier; index of
to contribute file-based data to the requested file; IP address
network and port to send file to
Table 2.1.1: Showing the message types in the Gnutella protocol (Source [3])

Gnutella uses TCP as its underlying transport protocol but it is abstracted by an application level
protocol which describes how peers communicate. Each message in the network is always preceded
by a descriptor header message that describes the payload of the Gnutella message. Message
descriptor headers are assigned unique identifier so that a peer that has already seen a message
before can ignore it (helps to avoid looping in the network). Descriptor headers also have a TTL
(Time-To-Live) value and a hops count value which keeps track of the times the message has been
forwarded.� Messages received by a peer are forward to other peers that are connected to it, in this
way message are flooded in the network to ensure it reaches it intended destination. �

To control the scope of flooding of Gnutella messages, the TTL value is set in the descriptor header
specifying the number of times the message should be forwarded before it can be discarded. In the
example below (figure 2.1.1) when a peer receives a ping message from a new peer in the network,
it replies back with a pong message and decrements the TTL value of the message. The ping
message is forwarded to other neighboring nodes which reply with a pong and decrement the TLL
value. Once the TTL value of the message is zero, the message is dropped from the network.

Figure 2.1.1: propagation of ping messages in the Gnutella network from peer A with TTL set to 2

Distributed discovery of resources in the Gnutella P2P network works in much the same way as
sending ping/pong message in the network; the initial query is generated by a peer and sent to
neighbor peers directly connected to it, these neighbor peers evaluate and then forward the query to
other neighbor peers. Peers that receive the query message evaluate it against its own data store and
if they have resources that match the query respond back with a QueryHit message to the original
peer.

Figure 2.1.2: Searching in Gnutella

Once the query initiator has aggregated the responses to its original query, it initiates download of
the resource by contacting the source peer �out of network�. The Gnutella protocol does not
support file download over its application level protocol rather a target peer must contact the source
peer directly using IP routing to establish a HTTP connection to download the file.
2.2 Bittorrent

Bittorrent represents a major innovation in the world of P2P computing. The protocol created in
2002 by Bram Cohen and was intended as an efficient and scalable alternative to current methods of
file distribution in today�s P2P networks. By its self Bittorrent is not a full fledged P2P content
sharing protocol, but it relies on other global components to allow users in the network locate file
and work in P2P fashion [6].

One of the main problems in current P2P system is that they do not scale well when downloading
large files. A typical internet connection has high download and significantly lower upload, so in the
traditional method when downloading file the source peer bears the grunt of the download since it
must appropriate portions of it limited upload bandwidth among the requestors of the file. This
approach is neither scalable nor efficient and ensuring fairness in the system would result in poor
download rates for all downloaders.

The Bittorrent protocol solution to ensure fairness in P2P was to split the files into little pieces of
same length (~256kB, with exception of maybe the last piece) which are then traded between peers
in a tit-for-tat manner. File pieces are downloaded in an unordered fashion from the source so that
peers can exploit the use of peer connection to other downloaders to obtain file pieces they do not
have. This novel approach in the Bittorrent protocol achieves �pareto� efficiency by
redistributing the cost of file download among the peers in the network and helps to prevent
parasitic behavior in the network [5]; using tit-for-tat method for trading pieces, peers with high
upload to other peers with probability will download faster

File pieces in Bittorrent are described in a small meta-info text file that ends with a .torrent suffix. A
.torrent files is a bencoded (an encoding format used in Bittorrent to store and transmit .torrent file
in the network) dictionary that contains information about the file pieces that makes up the original
file (Figure 2.2.1).

Figure 2.2.1: Structure of a .torrent file. The hash value of the file pieces is used as a checksum
allowing nodes to check the validity of a piece that they have downloaded

Peers download files by participating in a file swarm which is an ad-hoc network of peers that are
temporarily assembled to distribute a particular resource. Since Bittorrent is not really a P2P content
sharing protocol, it relies heavily on global components to allow nodes locate resources and also
find each in the network. The global components in a Bittorrent P2P network include torrent
servers, web search engines and the tracker server. Communication between the peers and global
component of Bittorrent P2P are passed through simple HTTP request/response messages.

Torrent servers in Bittorrent are ordinary web servers on the internet functioning as a data stores
for .torrent file. Users wishing to share files in the Bittorrent network first have to create a .torrent
file (figure 2.2.1) and upload it to a torrent server so other peers can obtain it (figure 2.2.2). To
reduce pollution (insertion of low quality or garbage files) in the network, a moderator system is
used to weed out fake content [6]. There are three levels of moderatorship in the network:
moderators, unmoderated submitter, and moderated submitter. A normal user who injects content
irregularly is called a moderated submitter. Users who frequently upload �quality� content can be
granted the status of un-moderated submitter; they are allowed directly inject content into the
system without peer review by moderators. Moderator status in a Bittorrent P2P network is the
equivalence of system administrator for the torrent server; they have complete control over what
can be inserted into the network.

Figure 2.2.2: Torrent server in Bittorrent P2P networks

The role of web search engines in the Bittorrent P2P network is to allow peer locate the .torrent
meta data file on the network. Web search engine play the role of a global directory (indexing
server) of available resource in the Bittorrent P2P network; they accept user queries for a .torrent
and return a resultset page of all possible match.

Figure 2.2.3: Interaction between torrent servers and web search engines in the Bittorrent P2P
network

Terms Definitions
Seed (seeder) A peer with a complete copy of the resource and still offers it for upload
(seeding)
Leech (lecher) Peer that contacts other peers to barter for chunks
Swarm Together, all peers downloading a resource
Choke Mechanism which allows client to prevent other clients from uploading
to it.
Share ratio Ratio of complete copies of the file in the swarm. Is expressed as a
(availability) percentage of number of peers with copies of the file and total number
of peers in the swarm. Each peer with complete copy adds 1 to the
total.� A peer with only a fraction of the complete file adds the fraction
 to the availability

Table 2.2.1: some terminology in Bittorrent networks

Trackers in the Bittorrent system play a central role in the downloading of file in the swarm. They
are responsible to help downloader locate one another in the system by keeping track of the seeders
and downloaders of a file. Peers wishing to participate in the swarm for a file must first obtain the
.torrent file to find out which tracker holds tracking information about the file and other important
information about the file.

Participants in a file swarm use the tracker as an intermediary to gather download statistics (figure
2.2.4); peers report to the tracker information about what pieces it has, its download & upload rate,
its IP address and port the Bittorrent client application is running on. Each peer poll the tracker for
information about other peers in the file swarm to find suitable peers to trade pieces. Trackers
respond to each request with a random list of peers that are participating in the swarm. This
property allows for robustness in the file swarm by ensuring that peers with fast and slow
connections have equal opportunity to maximize their download rate [5].

Figure 2.2.4: Bittorrent file swarm

Peers continuously trade piece with other peers in the network until they have obtained the
complete set of file pieces needed to reassemble the original file. The order in which pieces are
request from other peers in Bittorrent is optimized to improve their download rates. For peers that
are new in the file swarm (with no piece to trade) it is important that they obtain a complete piece as
soon as possible to start trading, so they used random piece selection algorithm for selecting a piece
to downloaded quickly. Once a peer has at least one complete piece to trade, it changes its strategy
of piece selection by choosing to download rare pieces in the network, this increases the probability
that peers will have blocks to exchange in the event that a seeder goes offline.

For file downloads to be successful in Bittorrent, at least one peer (seeder) with the complete file
must participate in the swarm until the complete set of file pieces has been fully disseminated in the
network, as a result this allows Bittorrent to efficiently handling �hot spots� or requests for large
files [6]. In the case of a large file, the seeder must stay online long enough until at least one peer
has successfully downloaded the file or subsets of the full set of file pieces in available on peers the
network. Eventually as more peers in the system complete their download and remain as seeders in
the network, request for file start to complete quickly since each new peer participating in a file
swarm adds additional upload bandwidth.

2.3 Freenet

Freenet is a highly decentralized system for secure and anonymous publishing and retrieval of
information [15]. The idea was first conceived in a paper published by Ian Clarke et al [7] in 2001.
It was designed to address the following issues in P2P systems:

 Security
 Publisher and consumer anonymity
 Deniability for storers of information
 Data replication for availability & performance

The above emphasis for Freenet networks makes it unique from the traditional P2P concept since
the focus on security and anonymity are concepts that seem to contradict the open notion of peer-to-
peer communication. However for the purpose of this survey we consider the underlying ability of
the Freenet protocol to allow nodes share content/resource securely in P2P fashion.

Freenet operates as an unstructured network of nodes that poll their unused disk space to store data
files in the network and cooperate to route request to the most likely physical location [7]. In some
respect, the Freenet network is similar to pure P2P networks, however in Freenet, owners of a node
cannot control what is being stored on their machine since placement of data in the system is done
in a distributed manner and the file stored on each node is encrypted to ensure deniability.

Message Description
Request.HandShake Sent by an unconnected peer to a remote
peer to request a Freenet peer connection
Reply.HandShake Reply by a remote that is available to
establish connection
Reply.Data Request for data (query)
Send.Data In-protocol mechanism for resource
download
Request.Insert A request to insert resource into the network
Reply.NotFound Returned when search or insert transaction
failed
Table 2.3.1: showing types of messages in the Freenet protocol

The basic means of communication between nodes in the network takes the form of messages
whose function is described in the Freenet protocol (table 2.3.1). Each message consists of a 64-bit
transaction ID that allows nodes to keep stateful information of messages that is routed through
them in the network. Messages also include a TTL (Time-To-Live) and depth counters; the TTL
counter is decremented at every hop to control the spread of the message in the network and the
depth counter is used by a replying node to set TTL to a high enough value to reach the requesting
node.

Protocol layer Description

Application layer This defines the actual messages that are passed,
encoded as per the previous layer, and the
prescribed behavior of nodes upon receiving
messages
Presentation/Message layer This simple layer defines the format in which FNP
 messages are sent across the network.
Crypto session layer This layer sets up the cryptographic link between
nodes. This handles the authentication of nodes, the
establishment of a cryptographic session, and
defines how data sent is encrypted.
Transport Layer Using traditional TCP/IP or other types of transport
protocol

Table 2.3.2: showing the Freenet protocol layer (Source [9])

Nodes in Freenet are arranged in a loosely structured overlay network similar to Gnutella; they are
connected to a set of neighbor nodes which they route message to/from. Peers join the Freenet
network by discovering address of one or more existing members of the network. Again like the
case of Gnutella, discovery of known peers in the network is not part of the protocol definition
although out-of-band means such as downloading list of peers from a server or manually supply the
Freenet node with an address of peers to contact are popular ways to setting up initial connection to
the network. After a remote Freenet node is contacted, a secure channel is built over the TCP/IP
transport layer and the new node sends a Request.HandShake message to the remote peer to initiate
a Freenet connection. If the remote peer is active, it can reply back with
a Reply.HandShake message indicating that it accepted the connection request. Connection states in
Freenet are treated as sessions and are only remembered for a few hours.

The Freenet protocol consists of 3 layers of abstraction (table 2.3.2) over TCP/IP which is used as
the main transport layer in the network (although Freenet was designed to be used independent of
which transport protocol it is run on). Message passing between nodes in the network occurs in the
presentation/message layer and its operation is similar to Gnutella networks but in Freenet,
messages are propagated to one neighbor at a time using a steep-hill-accent approach: once a peer
receives a message it has seen before, it disregards it and the propagation process unwinds to the
preceding node which chooses a different node to route to.

To prevent the possibility of an attacker unmasking the destination or origin of messages that passes
through the network, reference to the final destination peer and route history of a message is
removed and replace with the address of the peer that last routed the message; in this way, peers in
the Freenet network only have knowledge of their immediate upstream neighbors. Also, messages
in the network are forwarded with finite probability when hops to live reaches 1 to reduce the
information an attacker can deduce from the TTL value in a Freenet message [7][8].�

Nodes in the Freenet network maintain a local data repository that it makes available on the network
for reading and writing. Data files in Freenet networks are encrypted using either a descriptive text
(table 2.3.3) or with a public/private key pair which is hashed to produce a file key. Files are stored
and referred to in the network by the file key. There are three basic methods to generate keys for
files stored on the network,
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1. Keyword Signed Keys (KSK):� This type of key is the most basic but insecure method to
generate keys in Freenet. It is derived from the descriptive text of the file which is used to
generate a private/public key pair. The public key is hashed to yield the file key, and the
private key is used as a sign to verity the authenticity of a file when it is downloaded from
the network. Using KSK the file publisher of a file only has to publish the descriptive text
for the file to allow other users to locate it in the network.
 2. Self Signed Keys (SSK): This type of key alleviates the problem of key space collision
when using KSK. Using SSK, publishers generate a namespace of key for files that they
wish to insert in the network. The self signed keys are a public and private key pair; only the
user with the private key can insert files into the network. The descriptive text is used to
encrypt the file and the public key is used as a sign for the file.
3. Content Signed Keys (CSK): This type of key is obtained by directly hashing the contents
of the file to be inserted into the network. The key generated is used to encrypt the file
before it is inserted into the network.

freenet:KSK@text/philosophy/sun-tzu/art-of-war.doc
Table 2.3.3: An example of a Freenet file descriptive text. They are always proceeded by
the �freenet:� prefix. The next three characters denote the method for generating the
key. The characters after the �@� sign includes the files descriptive text.

The routing protocol in Freenet uses a heuristic scanning of key techniques to determine the most
likely destination/source for a file key; the target file key is matched for closeness with entries in
the routing table to determine the next node to route to. Nodes in the network have a local routing
table that contains entries for file keys that is stored in its local repository and entries for files keys
it �knows� is reachable through nodes it is connected. The association of file key to nodes in the
routing table is an ordered list based on a node�s previous performance on retrieving keys that are
lexicographically similar [8][15]. Once a request message for a file key is received, a node first
checks if it holds the data in its local data store before routing to a next hop.

To share a file in Freenet, the file has to be �inserted� into the Freenet network.
A Request.Insert message is sent to the user�s node to insert the combination of file key and data
into the network. In Freenet, files are stored in a location independent manner. This placement of
data is determined by its routing protocol. Once a node receives a request to insert a file in the
network, it saves the file in its local store and tries to route the insert message to a neighboring
node; the heuristic scanning of keys in a node�s routing table determines which neighbor nodes
would be �most interested� in storing the new content. The TTL value specified in the insert
message is used to control the scope of the insert message in the network. Since each node in the
network only has a limited amount of space to cache documents, older less recently used document
would get deleted from the network to make room for more popular content.

Freenet insures that files are dynamically replicated in the system to ensure it availability and
survivability. To prevent a malicious user from trying to overwrite existing files, by inserting data in
the network with an already existing file key, the propagation of the insert message in the network
starts to unwind at the point when a key collision is noticed; the node returns the pre-existing file as
if a request has been made for it.
 Figure (2.3.1): Showing how file searches in the Freenet network function. In this graph, vertices
represent nodes in the Freenet network, and the directed edges are the sequence of peer
communication in the network (Source [8])

Searching in Freenet networks only support exact match queries using the file keys, it is not
possible to perform a range/blind search in the network. To search in the network, a user posts a
query to its local node containing the descriptive text of the file to be retrieved from the network.
The node hashes the descriptive text to obtain a file key and the routing algorithm is used to
determine the likely location of the file in the system. If no match is found a Request.Data message
is routed to a next hop node till a Reply.NotFound/Send.Data message is received or when TTL
have reaches 0. In the case that aReply.NotFound message is return, the originating node tries the
second next hop for the file key.

Once a match for the file key is found, a Send.Data message, containing the file requested, is routed
from the source node to the querying node by back-tracing along the path through which the query
was routed (figure 2.3.1). In Freenet, nodes along the response path for a file key caches the file key
and data combination this is done to improve performance for subsequent searches. One of the main
side effects of this behavior is that nodes eventually become specialized in locating a set of similar
keys [4][7] and data in the network would eventually be replicated about its most frequent
requestors.

3 CONCLUSION

In this paper we surveyed the protocols of some of the most dominant P2P content sharing
networks. The protocols surveyed differ in their approach from the early P2P networks, learning
from the legal troubles of Napster, current P2P systems are pushing towards a decentralized
approach (with the exception of Bittorrent, which is not a full P2P content sharing protocol). This
push towards pure P2P has allowed the development of protocols to address some of the challenges
of peer networks such as security, anonymity, scalability, fairness and robustness in the networks.�
Each one of the protocols surveyed addresses some of the challenges in the implementation of their
protocol.

A major drawback for the protocols surveyed is that searching is quite expensive, with the exception
of Bittorrent networks that use a hybrid structure, the search mechanisms provided in the Gnutella
and Freenet networks are not efficient because network resource and bandwidth is wasted through
the flooding of query message in the network. Also the protocols of Gnutella and Freenet define no
standard way for new nodes to join the network. This is an issue especially for Freenet because the
current methods used to identify nodes to connect to are not secure and go against the principle of
preserving peer anonymity.

4������ REFERENCES
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Other Interesting Literature

[10] Duncan J. Watts, "The 'New' Science of Networks". Annual Review of Sociology,
2004 30:243-70
[11] Mihajlo A. Jovanovic, Fred S. Annexstein, Kenneth A. Berman, �Scalability Issues
in Large Peer-to-Peer Networks � A case study of Gnutella�.
[12] Wikipedia.org, �Peer-to-Peer�, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2P
[13] David Ferguson, �Trends and Statistics in Peer-to-Peer�. Retrieved 19/04/2006
from http://creativecommons.nl/nieuws/wp-
content/uploads/2006/04/CacheLogic_AmsterdamWorkshop_Presentation_v1.0.ppt
[14] The Gnutella Protocol Specification
v0.4 http://www9.limewire.com/developer/gnutella_protocol_0.4.pdf
[15] Wikipedia.org, �Freenet�, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
[16] Stephanos Androutsellis-Theotokis, Diomidis Spinellis, �A survey of Peer-To-Peer
content distribution technologies�. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 2004
[17] Understanding Peer-to-Peer, www.cachelogic.com/p2p/p2punderstanding.php

4.2���� Research Groups/Companies

Freenet project group
Bittorrent
Parallel and Distributed Systems Group at the Delft University of Technology,
Netherlands
 Peer-to-Peer Systems Research Group at Bilkent University: investigate research
issues in peer-to-peer systems and come up with solutions to the problems identified.
The focus is on databases, networking, and security aspects of peer-to-peer computing.
Gnutella: protocol development website
Internet Systems Group at the University of Toronto: