Scalability of the Gnutella Network and Business Opportunities of Peer-to-Peer Networking

Diploma Thesis from the year 2002 in the subject Electrotechnology, grade: 1,3 (A), Technical University of Munich (Elektrotechnics and Faculty for Communcations Networks), 25 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In this document we analyze the Gnutella* network's scalability by measuring the number of reachable servents* in the network and the loop probability. We distin-guish direct and indirect loops and show that the loop percentage is growing with the number of connection per client. For this reason our measurements show a re-duced number of reachable servents* from a single client on a per connection ba-sis. We argue that loops lead to a reduction in the number of reachable hosts. This im-plies a reduction in the occupied bandwidth from the Gnutella* protocol. Therefore the network is scaling much better than one may expect. In the second part we emphasize business opportunities for decentralized net-works and discuss benefits, challenges, market opportunities, risks, and threats for the four different areas of peer-to-peer computing. We come to the conclusion that peer-to-peer technology is offering great revenue streams in the future and that common platforms are needed to further push peer-to-peer into the markets. [...]