Interest-Based Peer-to-Peer Group Management

Peer-to-Peer systems become popular applications but suffer from insufficient resource availability which is caused by free-riders and inefficient lookup algorithms. To address the first cause, a number of recent works have focused on providing appropriate incentive mechanisms to encourage participants to contribute their resources to the P2P systems. To improve the lookup efficiency, locality-aware peer management has been introduced into the research community. However, existing proposals attempt to optimize the service performance during the data transmission period mostly after performing the neighboring lookup, which cannot address the fundamental concern of reducing lookup traffic. Besides, existing implementations select available contributors among random neighbors suggested by a specific server. Therefore, this paper proposes interest-based peer-to-peer management (IPM) protocol to facilitate the peering lookup. Our design philosophy differs from existing work that IPM is a client-only approach and can be represented as either an alternative or a complementary to the current proposals. With additional locality-awareness considerations, IPM can reduce the lookup overhead while optimizing the P2P traffic performance. The simulation results essentially state that IPM can largely improve the efficiency and reliability of P2P media distribution systems, for instance, reduces control overhead by 50% on average and reduces average packet loss rate up to 34.7%.