Exploiting the Heterogeneity in Structured Peer-to-Peer Systems

The structured peer-to-peer system, which is based on the distributed hash table, offers an administration-free and fault-tolerant application-level overlay network. However, a randomly structured overlay can not reflect the heterogeneity of a peer-to-peer system. In this paper, we propose a two-phase approach to exploit the heterogeneity in structured peer-to-peer systems. First, by exploiting the effects of both connections and nodes, we adjust the structure of overlay to reduce the lookup latency. And then a novel load balancing scheme based on lottery scheduling is proposed to balance not only the load but also the movement cost of the load. Our simulation results show that the performance, including query quality from the users’ view and load balance from the system’s view, can be greatly improved in a heterogeneous environment.