Forum based P2P network design using stable nodes

Abstract

Internet forums provide a varied and graceful stage for those who have hobbies or interests in common and want to share their contents of interest with each other. Traditionally they use Client-Server (CS) model. A distinct characteristic of a Internet forum is that some registered nodes1 periodically visit the forum. It implies that those nodes are regular visitors and can be considered relatively stable for some duration of time. The efficient use of these relatively stable nodes is very useful in a P2P network design, especially when the forum server is with limited bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a hybrid P2P network structure which is targeted for Internet forums. In the proposed system, the forum server maintains a list of registered nodes and classifies some nodes that are regularly visiting the forum with high probability as stable nodes. The P2P network created by these stable nodes is triggered when the forum server is highly demanded due to a special event. To resolve the bandwidth shortage problem, the forum server selects stable nodes in advance, according to each node's activity history. For the stable P2P node selection, we consider two types of mechanisms; a time period mechanism and a valid date window (VDW) mechanism, according to the considered time period. Then, we confirm that our proposed P2P model outperforms the traditional CS model through simulations.