Location-aware topology matching in P2P systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing has emerged as a popular model aiming at further utilizing Internet information and resources, complementing the available client-server services. However, the mechanism of peers randomly choosing logical neighbors without any knowledge about underlying physical topology can cause a serious topology mismatching between the P2P overlay network and the physical underlying network. The topology mismatching problem brings a great stress in the Internet infrastructure and greatly limits the performance gain from various search or routing techniques. Meanwhile, due to the inefficient overlay topology, the flooding-based search mechanisms cause a large volume of unnecessary traffic. Aiming at alleviating the mismatching problem and reducing the unnecessary traffic, we propose a location-aware topology matching (LTM) technique, an algorithm of building an efficient overlay by disconnecting low productive connections and choosing physically closer nodes as logical neighbors while still retaining the search scope and reducing response time for queries. LTM is scalable and completely distributed in the sense that it does not require any global knowledge of the whole overlay network when each node is optimizing the organization of its logical neighbors. The effectiveness of LTM is demonstrated through simulation studies.