Research on a Multi-layered and Multi-grouped Model for P2P Networks

This paper presents a multi-layered and multi-grouped model for P2P networks (MLG-P2P) whose overall architecture is a mixed P2P network. According to different requirement levels of security, MLG-P2P divides a P2P network into multi layers and creates peer groups in each layer, then builds the boundaries of resource sharing by groups, achieves trust assessments by layers, and adopts different security strategies in different layers for resource accessing. There are two types of peer groups: Peer Server groups and pure Peer-to-Peer groups, which closely relate to different mechanisms of realizing the safe access. Both of these two types of peer groups use the trust model to evaluate the trustworthiness of the visiting peer. Besides, a Peer Server group also has central servers to implement the center authentication. We propose TRUST-ARP protocols to realize the security strategy of the trust model. Furthermore, we also provide primary resource searching strategies and routing strategies of MLG-P2P.