Peer Interest-based Discovery for Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Systems

The success of content distribution oriented peer-to-peer systems heavily depends on the resource discovery mechanism. In case of large-scale distributed systems, this mechanism must be scalable and robust. The paper proposes a structured solution for resource discovery in decentralized peer-to-peer systems, which is guided by peer interest in collaborating with other peers. The problem of discovering peers of interest has many applications in file sharing, in data-aware scheduling, and in optimizing the files and documents downloads. Moreover, if trust is added as another parameter to define peers of interest, the interest-based discovery is useful in trusted P2P applications. We focused on developing the overlay network to ensure a very small number of messages required to retrieve, insert or delete a file even in the case of a very large network containing millions of nodes. In the experimental validation we used Over Sim, a simulation tool for P2P systems. The experimental results highlight the good performance obtained regarding message communication and system's scalability.