A Cooperation Mechanism for Pure P2P File-Sharing Networks to Improve Application-Level QoS

摘要

To provide application-oriented network services, a variety of overlay networks are deployed over physical IP networks. Since they share and compete for the same physical network resources, their selfish behaviors affect each other and, as a result, their performance deteriorates. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for pure P2P networks of file-sharing applications to cooperate with each other. In our proposal, a cooperative peer first finds another P2P network and establishes a logical link to a cooperative peer in the found network. Both ends of the logical link decide whether they cooperate or not from a viewpoint of the mutualism. When they consider they benefit from the cooperation, messages and files are exchanged among cooperative P2P networks through the logical link. For an efficient and effective cooperation, our mechanism has an algorithm for the selection of cooperative peers and a caching mechanism to avoid putting too much load on cooperative peers and cooperating networks. Simulation results showed that the number of discovered providing peers and the ratio of search hits increased about twice, while the load by the cooperation among P2P networks was reduced about half by caching.