Efficient content sharing taking account of updating replicas in hybrid peer-to-peer networks

Recently, peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic of contents sharing among network users has become one of the major parts of the Internet traffic, and many kinds of contents replication techniques have been investigated for smooth contents retrieval according to the users´ requests. However, the strategies are almost for pure P2P networks and those for hybrid P2P have not thoroughly researched yet. In a hybrid P2P system, it is relatively important to restrain storage resources, because the network load for contents searching is small. And besides, when a content item the replicas of which are scattered on a number of peers is updated, it is necessary to maintain their consistency. This paper proposes a method of content replication that restrains the consumption of the storage resources, and at the same time, manages contents´ consistency corresponding to their update for contents sharing in hybrid P2P networks. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposal is evaluated using computer simulations.