Maya-Pyramid: A Scalable and Self-Organizing Unstructured P2P Overlay

Locating content in an efficient and scalable way without centralized control is one of the challenges within P2P computing. The paper presents an unstructured P2P overlay called Maya pyramid overlay (MPO) where update and backup only take place in two neighboring levels or layers, differing from the recursive method in traditional hierarchical P2P tree-like structure overlay. Unlike normal redundant mechanisms for solving the single fault problem: tri-Information Center (Tri-IC) mechanism is presented in order to improve robustness by alleviating the load of cluster heads in a hierarchical P2P overlay. A source ranking mechanism is proposed in order to discourage free riding and whitewashing and to encourage frequent information exchanges between peers. Evaluation proved that MPO is robust, highly efficient and of a low-cost.