Segregation and Scheduling for P2P Applications with the Interceptor Middleware System

Very large size peer-to-peer systems are often required to implement efficient and scalable services, but usually they can be built only by assembling resources contributed by many independent users. Among the guarantees that must be provided to convince these users to join the P2P system, particularly important is the ability of ensuring that P2P applications and services run on their nodes will not unacceptably degrade the performance of their own applications because of an excessive resource consumption. In this paper we present the Interceptor, a middleware-level application segregation and scheduling system, which is able to strictly enforce quantitative limitations on node resource usage and, at the same time, to make P2P applications achieve satisfactory performance even in face of these limitations. A proof-of-concept implementation has been carried out for the Linux operating system, and has been used to perform an extensive experimentation aimed at quantitatively evaluating the Interceptor. The results we obtained clearly demonstrate that the Interceptor is able to strictly enforce quantitative limitations on node resource usage, and at the same time to effectively schedule P2P applications