PeerCQ: a decentralized and self-configuring peer-to-peer information monitoring system

PeerCQ is a totally decentralized system that performs information monitoring tasks over a network of peers with heterogeneous capabilities. It uses Continual Queries (CQs) as its primitives to express information-monitoring requests. A primary objective of the PeerCQ system is to build a decentralized Internet scale distributed information-monitoring system, which is highly scalable, self-configurable and supports efficient and robust way of processing CQs. This paper describes the basic architecture of the PeerCQ system and focuses on the mechanisms used for service partitioning at the P2P protocol layer. A set of initial experiments is reported, demonstrating the sensitiveness of the PeerCQ approach to large scale P2P information monitoring and the effectiveness of the PeerCQ service-partitioning algorithms with respect to load balancing and system utilization.