Towards Generic and Extensible Support for Adaptation in P2P Systems

Peer-to-peer environments are highly heterogeneous and are likely to become more so due to the proliferation of mobile Internet access technologies and the development of novel peer-topeer applications. Adaptation is essential in such heterogeneous systems in order to exploit the resources available on diverse nodes and tailor network services to meet the needs of diverse applications. We argue that existing support for resource awareness and adaptation in peer-to-peer systems is inadequate and we propose a framework for developing peer-to-peer systems with generic and extensible support for resource awareness and adaptation. A hybrid peer-to-peer model similar to Structella is used in this framework as a novel mechanism for supporting resource awareness and adaptation.