Zone Based Peer-to-Peer

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks without central entities, such as Gnutella or JXTA, generally suffer under a high signaling load resulting in poor efficiency. The main reason therefore is the necessity to flood requests in the overlay, since in most P2P protocols the nodes are not provided with any information about the P2P overlay network topology. This paper therefore addresses this application-layer routing problem, by proposing a new P2P routing protocol, the Zone Based P2P protocol (ZBP). ZBP establishes a zone for every peer. In its zone the peer knows the complete P2P overlay network topology and the available content. If a requested content is not available in its zone, bordercast messages are used, to search for the content in neighboring zones. Employing these concepts, ZBP achieves a notably improved signaling performance, compared to completely other routing approaches such as Gnutella 0.4 or Gnutella 0.6. As a proof of concept, we analyze the signaling performance of ZBP nodes and Gnutella nodes, with means of random graph theory and ns-2 simulation. Keywords— Peer-to-Peer, signaling, traffic, replication rate, application layer routing, resource sharing, Random Graphs