The effectiveness of realistic replication strategies on quality of availability for peer-to-peer systems

We take an availability-centric view on quality of service (QoS) and propose a model and mechanisms for studying the effectiveness of realistic replication schemes on availability QoS for peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. We especially tackle the dynamic replica placement (RP) problem where our focus is on choosing dynamically the number and location of replicas while (1) meeting different availability QoS requirements for all individual peers and (2) taking the intermittent connectivity of peers explicitly into account. We model P2P systems as a dynamic stochastic graph in which the nodes go up and down depending on their assigned up probability. We develop some simple heuristic algorithms for solving the RP problem, which are fully distributed and adaptive. Through an event-driven simulation study we compare and evaluate the achieved availability QoS of the proposed RP algorithms. Simulation results show that (1) even simple heuristics can achieve reasonably high availability QoS, and (2) satisfying availability QoS requires more replicas than for only increasing the hit rate.