Experimenting with Gnutella Communities

Computer networks or distributed systems in general may be regarded as communities where the individual components, be they entire systems, application software or users, interact in a shared environment. Such communities dynamically evolve with components or nodes joining and leaving the system. Their own individual activities affect the community’s behavior and vice versa. This paper discusses various practical experiments undertaken to investigate the behavior of a real system, the Gnutella network, which represents such a community. Gnutella is a distributed Peer-to-Peer data-sharing system without any central control. It turns out that most interactions between nodes do not last long and much of their activity is devoted to finding appropriate partners in the network. The experimental results presented have been obtained from a Java implementation of Gnutella running in the open Internet environment, and thus in unknown and quickly changing network structures heavily depending on chance.