Small-World File-Sharing Communities
<|reference_start|>Small-World File-Sharing Communities: Web caches, content distribution networks, peer-to-peer file sharing networks, distributed file systems, and data grids all have in common that they involve a community of users who generate requests for shared data. In each case, overall system performance can be improved significantly if we can first identify and then exploit interesting structure within a community's access patterns. To this end, we propose a novel perspective on file sharing based on the study of the relationships that form among users based on the files in which they are interested.   We propose a new structure that captures common user interests in data--the data-sharing graph-- and justify its utility with studies on three data-distribution systems: a high-energy physics collaboration, the Web, and the Kazaa peer-to-peer network. We find small-world patterns in the data-sharing graphs of all three communities. We analyze these graphs and propose some probable causes for these emergent small-world patterns. The significance of small-world patterns is twofold: it provides a rigorous support to intuition and, perhaps most importantly, it suggests ways to design mechanisms that exploit these naturally emerging patterns.<|reference_end|>
@article{iamnitchi2003small-world,
    title={Small-World File-Sharing Communities},
    author={Adriana Iamnitchi, Matei Ripeanu, Ian Foster},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0307036},
    year={2003},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={cs/0307036},
    primaryClass={cs.DC cond-mat cs.NI}
}