Enabling cooperation of consumer devices through peer-to-peer overlays

This paper introduces the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures when adopted as a technology enabler for assuring cooperation among cost-effective consumer devices, that increasingly support some kind of network connectivity. As a proofofconcept we exploit p2p to build a look-up infrastructure for Internet telephony-oriented applications with instant messaging (IM) and presence functionalities. The contributions of the paper are: i) understanding the reliability of p2p when is put in place instead of classical centralized solutions; ii) precisely quantifying whether consumer devices could be able to properly handle the needed degree of participation; iii) investigating properties of the overlay built by cooperating devices; iv) studying whether the p2p paradigm could be also applied to machinery deployed for "production quality" purposes. A performance evaluation is provided to quantify the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.