Improving Community Management Performance with Two-level Hierarchical DHT Overlays

In this paper, we evaluate a P2P community management system that works on top of a DHT-based P2PSIP protocol implementation. The key idea in our system is to establish a separate DHT overlay network for each community, resulting in multiple small overlays that are subsets of the main overlay. The main DHT overlay is largely used for community and membership information discovery. The feasibility of our two-level hierarchical system is evaluated with a prototype implementation. We compare our system against the flat structure where all the community related activities are performed in a single DHT overlay. The nodes’ average network traffic load is evaluated with varying parameters. In addition, the energy consumption of mobile nodes is measured. Our test results show that our P2P community management system performs especially well when there is plenty of community-related activity of the nodes.