Efficient and Scalable Consistency Maintenance for Heterogeneous Peer-to-Peer Systems

Consistency maintenance mechanism is necessary for the emerging peer-to-peer applications due to their frequent data updates. Centralized approaches suffer single point of failure, while previous decentralized approaches incur too many duplicate update messages because of locality-ignorant structures. To address this issue, we propose a scalable and efficient consistency maintenance scheme for heterogeneous P2P systems. Our scheme takes the heterogeneity nature into account and forms the replica nodes of a key into a locality-aware hierarchical structure, in which the upper layer is DHT-based and consists of powerful and stable replica nodes, while a replica node at the lower layer attaches to a physically close upper layer node. A d-ary update message propagation tree (UMPT) is dynamically built upon the upper layer for propagating the updated contents. As a result, the tree structure does not need to be maintained all the time, saving a lot of cost. Through theoretical analyses and comprehensive simulations, we examine the efficiency and scalability of this design. The results show that, compared with previous designs, especially locality-ignorant ones, our approach is able to reduce the cost by about 25-67 percent.