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Project JXTA: A Loosely-Consistent DHT Rendezvous Walker
Bernard Traversat, Mohamed Abdelaziz, Eric Pouyoul
Bernard.Traversat@Sun.Com
Project JXTA
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
901 San Antonio Road
Palo Alto, CA 94303, USA
Abstract
The open-source community Project JXTA defines an
open set of standard protocols for ad hoc, pervasive,
peer-to-peer (P2P) computing as a common platform
for developing a wide variety of decentralized network
applications. The following paper describes a loosely-
consistent DHT walker approach for searching adver-
tisements and routing queries in the JXTA rendezvous
network. The loosely-consistent DHT walker uses an
hybrid approach that combines the use of a DHT to
index and locate contents, with a limited range walker
to resolve inconsistency of the DHT within the
dynamic rendezvous network. This proposed DHT
approach does not require maintaining consistency
across the rendezvous network, a stable super-peer
infrastructure, and is well adapted to ad hoc P2P net-
work with high peer churn rate.
1. Introduction
Project JXTA[1,2,3,4] is an open-source project
(www.jxta.org) originally conceived by Sun Micro-
systems, Inc. and designed with the participation of
a growing number of experts from academic institu-
tions and industry. Project JXTA defines a common
set of protocols for building Peer-to-Peer (P2P)
applications to address the recurrent problem with
existing P2P systems of creating incompatible pro-
tocols. The main goal of Project JXTA is to define a
generic P2P network overlay usable to implement a
wide variety of P2P applications and services. The
Project JXTA platform provides core building
blocks (IDs, advertisements, peergroups, pipes) and
a default set of core policies. Developers can
replace any of the default policies by plugging their
own policies. For instance, the platform can be cus-
tomized to use new routing, membership or search
policies.
Section 2. provides a quick overview of the JXTA
virtual network abstractions. Section 3. introduces
the Resolver service and rendezvous peers as uni-
form resource locator on the JXTA network.
Section 4. describes and discusses the loosely-consis-
tent DHT, and the limited-range rendezvous walker.
Finally, Section 5. covers implementation status and
future directions.
2. Project JXTA Virtual Network
The Project JXTA protocols establish a virtual net-
work overlay on top of the existing physical network
infrastructure (Figure 1.). The Project JXTA virtual
network provides simple primitives to hide the com-
plexity of the underlying physical network topology
(firewalls, NATs, mobile IP and non-IP proximity
networks [5]) allowing any peer to uniformly address
any other peer on the network. Every network
resource is uniquely identified
1
and addressed inde-
pendently of its network location creating a virtual
indirection between the logical address and the physi-
cal address of network resources. Messages are
transparently routed, potentially traversing firewalls,
NATs, and using different transport protocols (Blue-
tooth, IrDA, TCP/IP, HTTP) to reach their final
destinations. The protocols standardize the manner in
which peers discover each other, self-organize into
peergroups, advertise and discover network resources,
communicate and monitor each other.
2.1 Message Routing
Project JXTA assumes an ad-hoc, multi-hop adaptive
network. Connections may be transient. Peers may
come and go at any time (high churn rate). Message
routing is nondeterministic. Routes may be unidirec-
tional (NAT, firewalls), and may change rapidly as
the network topology changes.
2.2 PeerGroups
Peers in the Project JXTA network self-organize into
peergroups. A peergroup represents an ad hoc set of
peers that have a common set of interests, and have
agreed upon a common set of policies (membership,
1. Each resource is assigned a unique ID. The refer-
ence implementation is using 128-bit UUIDs.