The Case for Service Provider Deployment of Super-Peers in Peer-to-Peer Networks

Peer-to-peer systems have recently introduced the notion of super-peers to improve search performance. While the benefit to end users is clear, it is not immediately evident who, if anyone, would be motivated to act as a super-peer. On the face of it, super-peers bear a much larger traffic burden than normal peers and receive negligible improvement in search performance when compared to any of the nodes they serve. In this paper we present incentives for several actors to deploy super-peers and propose a novel technical mechanism, topic-based search optimization, to increase the effectiveness of super-peers. By caching meta data— as opposed to content—at super-peers, topic-based search optimization has the potential to significantly improve the perceived search performance of a super-peer’s clients with very modest storage and communication overhead at the super-peer itself.