Study on trust-based maintenance of overlays in structured P2P systems

Structured peer-to-peer overlay maintenance mechanisms require efficient methods to find stale routing table entries and replace them with new entries in a way that retains the desired routing behavior. Futhermore, overlay maintenance algorithms require to be devised to handle peer churn, the continuous process of node arrival and departure. Existing strategies of selecting new entries for routing tables are usually based on logical identifiers or proximity. Non-trust neighborhood selection criterion is used. Over the past decade, a respectable number of e-commerce companies, such as Amazon, eBay, and NetFlix, have deployed trust in ranking their products and suppliers. Such rankings are capitalized as effective incentives and low-cost mechanisms, letting e-commerce companies enhance product marketing and sales management. Since the use of trust has brought many benefits to e-commerce companies, we propose to introduce trust to structured P2P overlay maintenance. In this paper, we propose a trust-based maintenance strategy, using quantified "trust" as the judge criterion for neighbor selection and next-hop selection during routing, considering different aspects of trust in common structured P2P systems. The simulation results show that our maintenance strategy, applying to Chord, leads to lower maintenance overhead, while the mean hops of queries are slightly increased but remain O(logN), where N denotes the network size, compared with original Chord.