Proposal and Analysis of Biologically-inspired Symbiotic P2P File-sharing Networks

Recently, various overlay networks have been widely deployed over physical IP networks. Since selfish behavior of overlay networks to satisfy demands of their applications and users often conflicts with each other, performance of the overall network system and quality of service offered to users easily deteriorate. To tackle the problem, our research group proposes the framework called overlay network symbiosis based on the biological symbiosis model where different bacteria coexist in the shared medium. In the overlay network symbiosis, overlay networks directly and/or indirectly interact with each other through the shared environment and accomplish cooperative or collaborative control. In this paper, as an example of biologically-inspired symbiotic overlay networks, we propose a mechanism that enables different P2P file-sharing networks to cooperate and live together with mediation of a portal server. In our proposed mechanism, the portal server provides users with transparent utilization of multiple P2P file-sharing networks by handling search requests and shared files in place of users. Through numerical analysis, we showed that the proposed mechanism improved the hit ratio of search requests in comparison to the scenario where P2P file-sharing networks were independent. Key–Words: Biological Symbiosis Model, P2P File-sharing, Cooperative Network, Numerical Analysis