RLM: Reliable and Locality-Aware Membership Protocol for Heterogeneous P2P Systems

P2P networks are considered to be the most important development for next generation Internet infrastructure. They always consist of large numbers of cooperative but dynamic member nodes. For these system to be effective, an efficient membership protocol is critical. This paper presents RLM which mainly focuses on locality-aware membership protocol in unreliable and heterogeneous P2P systems. RLM forms member nodes in a ring-based structure. Each node has a neighbor list whose length is proportional to its capacity. Member nodes self-adaptively optimize their neighborhood relations in terms of degree and link latency. To increase robustness, each node also has a successor list that consists of successor nodes down the ring. The successor list is with length of logarithm of the system size on average. Both the neighbor list and successor list are constructed in decentralized ways. Theoretical analysis and intensive simulations have shown the effectiveness of RLM. Specially, while the fault resilience is comparable to that of SCAMP in Ganesh, A.J., et al, (2003), RLM achieves up to 54.5% latency reduction.