Thermal Diffusion-Based Access Load Balancing for P2P File Sharing Networks

In the present paper, we propose a file replication method to dynamically balance loads of peers in unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks. Load balancing is considered to require uniform storage access by file replication. We then define the load index as the storage access ratio. In the proposed method, each peer autonomously regulates the file replication probability to uniform storage accesses as thermal diffusion phenomena. Simulation results reveal that the proposed method can control the file sharing network to balance loads while dynamically adapting to change of storage accesses that is caused by change of popularity trends, and therefore keep load balancing performance stable. In addition, the proposed method achieves greater adaptability to sudden changes in storage accesses than our previous method.