Supporting scalable multiparty session in P2P based mobile instant messaging

As the inherent defects of the client-server model, the dependency on the server profoundly confines the system's scalability and seriously clashes the reliability and security of the system. This situation grows into more serious when numerous peers involved in a multiparty IM session. To remedy these deficiencies, this research probes the prospects of using P2P networking paradigm in the multiparty mobile IM systems. In our design, the load on the mobile peers can be greatly reduced with the help of the powerful super peers. Besides, the peers involved in a multiparty session will be adaptively distributed into a few groups. These groups can dynamically grows/shrinks to reduce the message load on the peers and achieve groupware communications in a multiparty session. As will be shown in the simulation results, to effectively support P2P based multiparty mobile instant messaging services, the methods proposed in this paper can remarkably reduce the message load on the peers without obviously increasing the signaling overhead.