SOPSys: Self-Organizing Decentralized Peer-to-Peer System Based on Well Balanced Multi-Way Trees

This paper proposes SOPSys, a decentralized, self-organizing peer-to-peer architecture. The overlay network is extremely scalable being organized as a well balanced multi-way tree according to the trust value of each peer. The root is only responsible for maintaining and publishing a list of existing nodes and does not take part into the joining or routing process. The joining algorithm preserves the balance of the tree, guaranteeing a reduced join and discovery cost. The number of exchanged messages for these phases is logarithmic time: O(log_k N), where k represents the branching factor of the overlay tree, and N represents the total number of nodes. The conducted experiments have proven that the joining algorithm assures that the overlay tree is well balanced and thus offers high scalability.