A super-peer based lookup in structured peer-to-peer systems

All existing lookup algorithms in structured peer-to-peer (P2P) systems assume that all peers are uni-form in resources (e.g., network bandwidth, storage and CPU). Messages are routed on the overlay net-work without considering the differences of capabilities among participating peers. However, the heterogene-ity observed in deployed P2P systems is quite extreme (e.g., with up to 3 orders of magnitude difference in bandwidth). The bottleneck caused by very limited capabilities of some peers therefore could lead to inef-ficiency of existing lookup algorithms. In this paper we propose a super-peer based lookup algorithm and eval-uate it using a detailed simulation. We show that our technique not only greatly improves the performance of processing queries but also significantly reduces ag-gregate bandwidth consumption and processing cost of each query.