Using a Diffusive Approach for Load Balancing in Peer-to-peer Systems

We developed a diffusive load balancing scheme that equalizes the available capacities of nodes in a peer-to-peer (P2P) system. These nodes may have different resource capacities, geographic locations, or availabilities (i.e., length of time being part of the peer-to-peer system). The services on these nodes may have different service times and arrival rates of requests. Using the diffusive scheme, the system is able to maintain similar response times for its services. Our scheme is a modification of the diffusive load balancing algorithms proposed for parallel computing systems. This scheme is able to handle services with heterogeneous resource requirements and P2P nodes with heterogeneous capacities. We also adapted the diffusive scheme to clustered peer-to-peer system, where a load balancing operation may move services or nodes between clusters. After a literature survey of this field, this thesis investigates the following issues using analytical reasoning and extensive simulation studies. The load balancing operations equalize the available capacities of the nodes in a neighborhood to their averages. As a result, the available capacities of all nodes in the P2P system converge to a global average. We found that this convergence is faster when the scheme uses neighborhoods defined by the structure of the structured P2P overlay network rather than using randomly selected neighbors. For a system with churn (i.e. nodes joining and leaving), the load balancing operations maintain the standard deviation of the available capacities of nodes within a bound. This bound depends on the amount of churn and the frequency of load balancing operations, as well as on the capacities of the nodes. However, the sizes of the services have little impact on this bound. In a clustered peer-to-peer system, the size of the bound largely depends on the average cluster size. When nodes are moved among clusters for load balancing, the numbers of cluster splits and merges are reduced. This may reduce the maintenance cost of the overlay network