It's a bit dated at this point, but still give an ok overview of networks like Gnutella, EDonkey and Bittorrent and also goes into the more exotic ones.
Sadly no mention of I2P even though it was working quite well even back then. http://www.i2p2.de/
You can use Bittorrent in it, there is a emule port, gnutella etc. Works quite well. I often have download speeds of ~50Kilobytes/s in Bittorrent. It is a self-contained net with some trackers.
True, if I had more time I would have added I2P too.
Since the thesis was only 12 out of 30 credits in that semester, I opted for looking at the anonymizing properties of 'regular' file-sharing software and software with anonymity as a main focus rather than looking at generic overlay networks too. This would have been the next step though :)
I remember adding it to my "read later" list at some point in the past, but that's an ever growing stack of PDF files :)
While I can't say anything about it from a networking point of view, a big problem is that there is no easy "how can I use this" guide on the project page. I firmly believe that a well packaged implementation is the basis for anything :)
It also seems to be an overlay network. I personally think that an encrypted friend2friend Darknet approach is more useful as an first step rather than trying to do it on an internet scale. "Social" Darknets offer a good balance between transfer speed, security and people being ok with their upload being used (since it's by their direct friends).
I'm still waiting for a usable software that integrates within existing social networks (twitter, facebook, ...) to gather peers
A thesis on anonymous p2p networks that fails to mention basically any of the notable anonymous p2p networks (e.g. freenet, Share, Perfect Dark, ...) or protocols (WASTE).
This wasn't a thesis on anonymous P2P networks themselves, I was only looking at end-user compatible, actual implementations of file-sharing software rather than overlay networks. I should have probably clarified that a bit more.
I was also mostly focusing on networks with active communities that are still in development.
- WASTE isn't developed any more and hasn't been for quite some time
- Share and Perfect Dark are both closed source and only active in Japan. This makes them pretty much useless (closed source) and I wouldn't call them "notable" if they're limited to a single country and some scattered anime fans. Users of these networks have also been arrested in Japan for copyright violation, so I'm not sure how good their implementation actually was.
As for freenet: This is true, I should have probably spent the time. Sadly, this thesis was only 12 of 30 credits in that semester, so most of the time I had to do something else and was a bit limited when it came to depth and breadth.
It's a bit dated at this point, but still give an ok overview of networks like Gnutella, EDonkey and Bittorrent and also goes into the more exotic ones.
As far as I see it, the currently 'usable' clients that use darknets and turtle-hopping are Oneswarm (http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu) and AllianceP2P (http://code.google.com/p/alliancep2pbeta/)
p.s. Sorry about the language, it was my first bigger paper written in English, so I'm a bit heavy on the passive forms and runaway sentences.