Project Abstract:
Naming and lookup services are essential in any distributed systems
for locating resources. Conventional systems use either centralized
or hierarchic schemes which often create hot spots in a system.
Recent developments in peer-to-peer systems offer new scalable
alternatives. Peer-to-Peer systems, or P2P systems for short, are
distributed, self-organizing systems without any central authority.
Nodes or peers in P2P systems are of equal roles and capacities in
sharing resources (including data, computing power etc.), and they
can communicate directly with each other. To evaluate different
options for the overlay network (i.e. the communication links
between the peers), the cost and performance of a design are
measured mainly in terms of the node degrees of the overlay
network, latency (number of hops) associated with a query and
overhead due to the topology-maintenance protocols. Compared
with unstructured P2P systems, structured systems offer better
performance and are more scalable, but they are less robust. The
goal of this project is to design structured P2P systems for efficient
lookup service that adapt to dynamic fluctuations in the overlay
networks due to nodes’ joining, departure, and failures. We will
design and analyze suitable overlay topologies and protocols for
supporting various forms of queries. |