Dynamic Load Sharing in Peer-to-Peer Systems: When Some Peers Are More Equal than Others

Object caching and replication are the primary mechanisms for addressing load balancing in peer-to-peer systems. In structured P2P networks, object popularity is an important challenge because it can adversely impact both the request and forwarding loads in the network. To balance loads across P2P networks, the authors propose a method for dynamically updating routing tables to balance the load induced by forwarding traffic in the neighborhood of nodes holding popular objects.