Abstract
The Internet today is commonly used as a medium to share large size multimedia
content. This sharing is carried out, a number of times, through the Peer to Peer
sharing architecture rather than the conventional server-client model. The paucity
of network addresses in the Internet has led to the emergence of private and global
networks. Because the identity of peers in a private network remains hidden behind
their global endpoint, P2P applications cannot run between two peers in separate
private networks. Techniques such as hole-punching require the use of a centralized
entity which serves as a bottleneck to the P2P application.
We have proposed a hierarchical P2P network of private and global networks. Here, the
lower tier is formed by the peers in each private network, while the upper tier is formed
by the global endpoints (called proxies) of each of these private networks. We have
designed a new file sharing protocol, FTPNP, between these proxies which preserves
the identities of the actual endpoints of the file transfer, present in separate private
networks. We have also created a Credit Management System in order to ensure fairness
and incentive to share in the designed hierarchical P2P system. We have implemented
all the above proposed features and tested them to ensure the preservation of the
essential features of a P2P network.