A Diffusive Load Balancing Scheme for Clustered Peer-to-Peer Systems

Node clustering is an effective solution for achieving good performance and high reliability for peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. To improve the performance of a clustered P2P system, it is important to balance the service load among the clusters in the system. In this paper, we describe a diffusive load balancing scheme for clustered P2P systems, which dynamically adjusts the size of the clusters, by moving nodes among the clusters, based on their service demands and node resource capacities. Our simulations show that the proposed load balancing scheme significantly improves the performance of a P2P system in terms of balanced available capacity.

I. Introduction

P2P systems become popular with their scalable architecture, flexible organization and low cost; one question is whether these systems could host services, for example, web services. Services are provided by servers in a client/server system; it is important for a server to assure the quality of its service to its clients. Because the nodes in a P2P system are highly dynamic on their on-line time and widely heterogeneous on their resource capacity, currently, P2P are mainly used for applications that are able to tolerant interruptions, e.g., file sharing, downloading, or video delivery. The ability of a P2P system to consistently provide high quality services is questionable.