iRank: Supporting Proximity Ranking for Peer-to-Peer Applications

Proximity ranking according to end-to-end network distances (e.g., Round-Trip Time, RTT) can reveal detailed proximity information, which is important in network management and performance diagnosis in distributed systems. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no similar work on this subject in the P2P computing field. We present a distributed rating method iRank, that enables proximity rankings by providing discrete ratings in a distributed manner. It formulates the proximity ranking as a rating problem that faithfully captures the proximity based on noisy distance measurements scalably and practically. The primary challenge in inferring proximity rankings is enforcing distributed ratings with complex rating policies. Our solution is based on reconstructing ratings by decomposing a centralized rating method Maximum Margin Matrix Factorization (MMMF) into independent sub-problems, that can be efficiently solved in a decentralized manner. By relaxing the dependence on infrastructure nodes that are a single point of failure and limit scalability, iRank can gracefully handle network churns. Through real network latency data sets, we demonstrate that iRank can predict ratings with low distortion, which are smaller than 20 percentage worse than the centralized method, in the context of synthetic complex rating policies.