An Asynchronous Peer-to-Peer Service Extension Using the General E-mail Service

The general peer-to-peer based service system formed as an overlay network on top of the underlying physical computer network and the overlay network can be distinguished with the hybrid peer-to-peer network or the pure peer-to-peer network in terms of their centralization and structure. Because of no central server, the pure peer-to-peer network can release the server management cost, the single point of failure problem, the traffic overload or the scalability problem. Regardless of this kind of advantages, the pure peer-to-peer network has the critical problem in the case of that if the peers known to have the requested shared resource is temporary offline, there is no way to connect or to send a request to that peer because there is no central server. In this paper, we proposed the asynchronous peer-to-peer service extension method using email server in pure peer-to-peer networking environment. According to this method, it is possible to provide the peer-to-peer services not only when the two edge peers are online but also when one of the edge peers is temporary offline. Therefore, the proposed method can be used to increase the service availability of the small-sized peer-to-peer network in which the shared resources are not guaranteed to be always available. Also, the proposed method can be effective for the mobile network in which mobile device is not always online.