Replication methods for load balancing on distributed storages in P2P networks

In a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, in order to improve the search performance and to achieve load balancing, replicas of original data are created and distributed over the Internet. However, the replication methods, which have been proposed so far focus only on the improvement of search performance. We examine the load on the storage systems, which is due to writing and reading, and propose two replication methods for balancing the load on the storages distributed over P2P networks while limiting the degradation of the search performance within an acceptable level. Furthermore, we investigate the performance of our proposed replication methods through computer simulations, and show their effectiveness in balancing the load.