M-Ring: A Distributed, Self-Organized, Load-Balanced Communication Method on Super Peer Network

Many peer-to-peer file sharing systems have been proposed to take the locality and heterogeneity into account. The two-layered architecture is one of the most widespread systems with abilities by classifying peers into groups and serving some powerful peers as the super peers. In order to communicate with other sets of super peers, each super peer has to connect with all the other super peers within its neighboring group or other groups by some gateway-like super peers. However, it may be the problem of the single-point-of-failure if using peers as the gateway-like peers. In this paper, we propose a distributed, self-organized and load-balanced communication method - M-Ring. In this method, each super peer connects with other sets of super peers within its neighboring group by constructing its link table. Also, each super peer in the different groups has a unique identity within the same identity space. Besides, we notice a "overlap handle scope" feature while all super peers who are in the different groups are in the same identity space. We use this feature to enhance the efficiency of query of super peers. Our method can reduce the total requirements of storage space and bandwidth by storing different portion of metadata. The simulation results show that our approach efficiently reduces the overhead of connections among super peers within their neighboring groups.