Documentation for the P2PNS live demo

For demonstration purposes we've deployed our distributed name service P2PNS on the ​PlanetLab research network. Currently our name service is running on about 450 nodes, which are monitored by a management node. Every node has registered a SIP name and can be called with an unmodified SIP UA (there's an echo service running on each node).

Network monitor

The management node provides the current network status either on this ​webpage or as ​kml file, which can be viewed with ​Google Earth.

Each icon represents the status of a PlanetLab node. The lower part of the icon shows the general node status, the middle part show the overlay status and the upper parts indicates, if the node successfully registered a SIP name.

Things you can try

• Watch the load avarage of a PlanetLab node by clicking on an icon on the monitor page.
• Make a test call from the management node to any of the PlanetLab nodes: Click on a icon on the monitor page and click on the "Call this node" link. This will open a new window showing the call setup latency (from the initial SIP INVITE to the 200 OK) and the number of SIP retransmissions.
• You can try a test call with you local SIP client: Simply click on a icon on the monitor page and look for the registered SIP name sip:xxx@p2pname.org. Dial this name with your SIP UA and you should get connected to the echo test service on this node.
• Register a new SIP user in the P2PSIP overlay with your local SIP client: Configure p2pname.org:5061 as registrar and outgoing SIP proxy and choose an arbitrary user name with empty password.
• Use the command interface from the monitor page to control a P2PNS node. You could e.g. try to lookup the siblings to a key using different routing modes and compare the measured lookup latency.

Overlay parameters

The P2PNS nodes in PlanetLab currently use the following parameters:

• Kademlia with k=20 and s=8 siblings
• Iterative, exhaustive iterative, semi recursive, full recursive or source routing
• Only UDP for overlay signaling
• DHT with 4 replica
• Parallel lookups and DHT queries