Designing a Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Network with Rapid Service Discovery and Effective Load Balancing

Abstract

Peer-to-peer systems (P2P) have attracted much current attention as a popular way to share huge volumes of resources directly within peers. Efficient content search and load balancing are both important research issues in P2P environments, especially in those without centralized global indexes. Although a number of content search schemes are known to alleviate these problems, they cannot provide flexible object searches while balance the load for content demand in P2P network, thereby resulting in severe load imbalance and consequently increased user response times. In this paper we tend to address these problems by harnessing all available resources in the P2P network and balance the load without decreasing user response time. We proposed a novel decentralized service discovery mechanism by creating a new service call P2P Registry (P2PReg) in Domain Name Server (DNS). In our scheme, each peer is able to register and discover desirable services automatically through current DNS within a short duration in an efficient way. The proposed method not only performs least searching time and low bandwidth but also balances load in P2P systems in order to avoid hot spot problems naturally. It is obvious that the more replicas there are, the better the media delivery quality of the specific content object is. We also present the results of simulation work to validate the viability of our approach. Our simulation study showed that serving data discovery over local search is indeed effective in improving the system performance significantly.