A Resilient P2P Architecture for Mobile Resource Sharing

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems present a unique medium for resource sharing among cliques of participants (peers) in a distributed and self-organized manner. With the advent of mobile users and the increasing power of mobile devices, the spectrum of P2P capabilities should scale. Peers establish transient or persistent relationships with other peers based on mutual interest. Communicating peers may use intermediary peers to forward communication messages, if a direct link is beyond their communication range. A critical design parameter is establishing a resilient communication topology, yet reduce the overhead of control messages required to instill and maintain it. This rises as a significant hindrance in mobile environments, which pose additional challenges on P2P networks due to the heterogeneity of nodes, limited resources, dynamic contexts in addition to the inherited wireless network stringencies. Thus far, efforts in establishing P2P networks via super peers (SPs) have been capped by considering a subset of peer properties to evaluate their candidacy. This paper presents RobP2P, a robust architecture to construct mobile P2P networks and efficiently maintain network state. RobP2P introduces a SP selection protocol based on a dynamic score function that takes into account peers’ capabilities and context, such as location and quality of connectivity. The paper also presents an agile utility function through which SPs can delegate monitoring responsibilities to comparably powerful and stable peers to ensure self-healing topology maintenance. We present an elaborate performance evaluation of RobP2P implemented on Network Simulator NS-3. Our results illustrate the efficiency of RobP2P, its resilience to failures, and the improvements in lowering overhead traffic while reliably maintaining the consistency of network state.