A comparison of spread methods in unstructured P2P networks

Abstract

In recent years, unstructured Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications are very popular on the Internet. Unstructured P2P topology has power-law characteristic in the link distribution, containing a few nodes that have a very high degree and many with low degree. This reflects the presence of central nodes which interact with many others and play a key role in relaying information. The system performance can be improved by replicating file location information to the high degree nodes in unstructured P2P. In this paper, we present an overview of several spread mechanisms for unstructured P2P and analyze the performance of them relative to the number of information replica and the bandwidth consumption. The optimal spread mechanism is high degree spread method. Simulation results empirically evaluate their behavior in direct comparison and verify our analysis. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.