Fault Tolerance for Super-Peers of P2P Systems

This paper presents an efficient fault-tolerant approach for the super-peers of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing systems. In the super-peer based P2P file sharing system, peers are organized into multiple groups. In each group, it has a special peer called super peer to serve the regular peers within the group. In this hierarchical architecture, if the super peer departs (fails), any file queries to its serving regular peers cannot be delivered. In the proposed approach, we propose a multiple publication technique to make each regular peer logically connect with two or more super peers in other groups. If a regular peer finds that its serving super peer cannot work, one of its other connected super peers will be selected as its new serving super peer to continuously process the file queries. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed approach, comprehensive simulations are performed to quantify the performance and overhead of the proposed approach.