EFFECTIVE TOPOLOGY-AWARE PEER SELECTION IN UNSTRUCTURED PEER-TO-PEER SYSTEMS

Peer-to-Peer systems form logical overlay networks on top of the Internet. Essentially, peers randomly choose logical neighbours without any knowledge about underlying physical topology. This may cause inefficient communications among peers. This topology mismatch problem may result in poor performance and scalability for Peer-to-Peer systems. A possible way to improve the performance of Peer-to-Peer systems is the overlay network construction based on the knowledge of the physical network topology. In this paper, we will propose the use of the “Record Route” and “Timestamp” options supported in the IP protocol to explore the paths between peers. By the topology-aware peer selection, our approach outperforms traditional P2P systems using random peer selection. Our approach only incurs a low overhead and can be deployed easily in various P2P systems