Minicamp: Middleware for Incomplete Participation in Structured Peer-to-Peer Monitoring Protocols

In order to provide a certain level of quality to the users of a peer-to-peer network, the network's status needs to be monitored in the first place. In this paper, we tackle the problem of monitoring peer-to-peer networks with structured monitoring solutions with the constraint of incomplete participation of the nodes in the monitoring process. We propose a middleware overlay which operates between the common p2p overlay aiming at routing and resolving lookups and a monitoring overlay aiming to obtain and disseminate statistics on the network. Our solution covers an assignment, maintenance and probing scheme to build up a common global view for all nodes in the common p2p overlay. Evaluation shows a high precision for the assignment and probing scheme in the presence of only a fraction of the nodes in the network contributing to the monitoring.