Plover: A Proactive Low-Overhead File Replication Scheme for Structured P2P Systems

File replication is a widely used technique for high performance in peer-to-peer file sharing systems. A file replication technique should be efficient and meanwhile facilitates efficient file consistency maintenance. However, most traditional methods don´t consider node available capacity and physical location in file replication, leading to high overhead for both file replication and consistency maintenance. This paper presents a proactive low-overhead file replication scheme, namely Plover. By making file replication among physically close nodes based on node available capacities, Plover not only achieves high efficiency in file replication but also supports low-cost and timely consistency maintenance. It also includes an efficient file query redirection algorithm for load balancing between replica nodes. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of Plover in comparison with other file replication schemes. It dramatically reduces the overhead of both file replication and consistency maintenance compared to other schemes. In addition, it yields significant improvements in reduction of overloaded nodes.