Enhancing Routing Robustness of Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks Using Mobile Agents

The growing popularity of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology in real applications in recent years has sparked increasing interest from both academia and industry in designing resilient P2P networks for these applications. Routing is a crucial technique to support successful P2P applications, and designing robust routing mechanisms is still a technical challenge for P2P systems and applications due to their inherent dynamics. This paper addresses the issue of resilient routing in unstructured P2P networks. To this end, we first propose a novel query routing approach to improving query performance in unstructured P2P networks, and then develop a mobile agent based network reconfiguration mechanism that provides a combined node and link failure diagnosis and restoration to maintain routing performance even in dynamic network environments. Simulated results show that the proposed query routing approach can achieve a good tradeoff between query hit rates and space costs in scale-free networks and that the mobile agent based network reconfiguration mechanism outperforms the existing methods in different types of network topologies.