Virtual Communities

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Virtual Communities
Dr. Ir. Johan Pouwelse peer2peer_at_gmail.com Freeban
d, I-Share
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Content

• Peer-to-Peer
• P2P Television
• Scientific achievements 2005
• Valorisation
• Cooperation BBC, Omroep, ilse
• Startups
• Other universities

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P2P - The new medium
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P2P

• Definition Aggregate use of distributed
  resources
• Cost structure
• Setup
• Maintain
• Scalability (superiour to Client/Server)
• Availability (efficiency reliability)
• Fault-tolerance (recovers from errors)
• Self-organization (deals with dynamic activities)

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P2P examples

• Skype (Communication)
• Millions of users
• NAT circumvention/Firewall avoidance
• 0.017 Euro per minute
• Wikipedia.org (Information)
• People collaboration
• Joined knowledge
• File Sharing (The new medium)
• Controversial
• gt60 Internet traffic

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BBC usage of P2P
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I-Share project

• Focus
• Sharing resources in virtual communities

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I-Share people

• TUDelft, VU, Utwente, TU/e, Philips
• Multi-disciplinary (CS, EE, Ind. Design)
• 30 people (6 prof .. 1 B.Sc.)

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Measurements understanding

• Google bittorrent measurement
• Two years of research (At Delft MIT)
• Longest and largest measurement
• 800,000 users
• US F.T.C.
• Analysis
• Download speed
• Availability
• Integrity
• Flashcrowds

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I-Share The vision

• Near-zero cost infrastructure for
• distributing archiving
• 100,000 narrowcast TV channels

defining the future of television
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Approach P2P-Television

• Every user helps
• Forward video to others

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Research question Decentralisation

• Create collaborative distribution network
• How to
• Connect
• Discover available TV channels
• Find other watching a specific channel
• Join channel
• Without any central authority
• No known efficient solution

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2005 achievements

• One year beyond the state-of-the-art
• Largest File Sharing team
• Extend Open Source BitTorrent (73,000 downl/week)
• Application-level IPv6, IPSec, Mobile IP,
  Multicast
• Bootstrap existing social networks (MSN,GMail,
  etc)
• BBC iMP-2
• Software which understands
• Friends
• Taste
• Internet

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System architecture
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Valorisation

• Universities
• TUDelft, Industrial Design
• VU Amsterdam
• MIT, Boston
• Harvard, Boston
• Rice University, Houston
• University of Arts Design, Helsinki
• Publication
• New York Times (50/50)
• BBC news
• Workshop Hilversum, 17 March

• Industry
• Philips
• Nokia
• ilse media (Startpagina,nu.nl)
• AHT
• Content
• BBC
• Dutch Public Broadcasters
• VPRO
• Paradiso

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Summary

• Defining the future of television
• Approach P2P-Television
• Help and forward to others
• Innovations
• One year beyond state-of-the-art
• Application-level Ipv6, IPSec, MobileIP,
  multicast
• Understand friends, taste, Internet
• ValorisationNokia, BBC, Philips, Harvard, ..

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P2P file sharing ecosystem

• Significant social demand
• 85,000,000 addicted users
• 24 Hours (songs/games/TV shows/movies)
• Legal/Tech. counter-measures ineffective
• Insufficient knowledge at content providers
• Not a single operational DRM system
• Evolution of business models
• Adjust to near-zero cost technology
• iTunes Music Store TV-Series download
• Artist to consumer

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Goal

• Scalable low-cost Internet television
• Arbitrary number of viewers
• Low start-up cost
• Low operating cost

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Current Internet TV technology

• Single video server
• Scalability and cost problems

0010101
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Our goal P2P-TV
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Innovations
Research questions

• Decentralization
• Availability
• Integrity and trust
• Incentives to cooperate
• Network transparency

• Social locality
• Semantic clustering
• Secure personal identifier

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Innovation Social Locality

• Build on top of social network
• Spread video data
• Distribute functionality
• Understand human group dynamics
• Friends or colleagues cooperate
• Exploit altruism
• Different approach
• 90 of P2P researchers algorithms without
  real-world context
• Add quantifiable social phenomena
• Evaluate using prototype

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Early results social networks
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Demonstrator 2 Real-time TV streaming

• Skype-2
• Working MDC
• Encoding
• Decoding
• Robust multicast tree
• Multiple bit rates
• Re-use code
• Bartering
• Reputation
• Superpeers
• NAT/Firewall