PeerWindow: an efficient, heterogeneous, and autonomic node collection protocol

Nodes in peer-to-peer systems need to know the information about others to optimize neighbor selection, resource exchanging, replica placement, load balancing, query optimization, and other collaborative operations. However, how to collect this information effectively is still an open issue. In this paper, we propose a novel information collection protocol, PeerWindow, with which each node can collect a large amount of pointers to other nodes at a very low cost. Compared to existing protocols, PeerWindow is 1) efficient, the cost of collecting 1,000 pointers being less than 1 kbps in a common system environment, 2) heterogeneous, nodes with different capacities collecting different amounts of information, and 3) autonomic, nodes determining their bandwidth cost for node collection by themselves and adjusting it dynamically. PeerWindow can be used in many existing peer-to-peer systems and has tremendous potential for future expansions.