Designs and Evaluation of a Tracker in P2P Networks

The "tracker" of a P2P system is used to lookup which peers hold (or partially hold) a given object. There are various designs for the tracker function, from a single-server tracker, to multiple-server tracker system, to DHT-based serverless systems. In this paper, we classify the different designs, discuss the different considerations for these designs, and simple models to evaluate the reliability of these designs.