A novel peer selection mechanism in heterogeneous wireless peer-to-peer networks

Peer selection is one of the key issues in wireless peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and most of the traditional methods and algorithms those have been proposed are only based on homogeneous network. However, networks in the future will be highly heterogeneous. Different kinds of wireless networks such as GSM, UMTS, WLAN, exist together in the same area and different networks have different features and abilities. Thus peer selection in heterogeneous wireless networks will become more realistic. To solve this problem, we first propose a novel mechanism in which peer and its access network are treated together as a whole entity, which we call a virtual peer and then propose a virtual peer selection (VPS) algorithm based on information entropy theory and utility function to complete our mechanism. Simulation results show that our mechanism has much better performance. Simulations show that our mechanism has a better performance both in peer ability and energy consumption.