A hybrid topology architecture for P2P file sharing systems

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008. Over the Internet today, there has been much interest in emerging Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks because they provide a good substrate for creating data sharing, content distribution, and application layer multicast applications. There are two classes of P2P overlay networks: structured and unstructured. Structured networks can efficiently locate items, but the searching process is not user friendly. Conversely, unstructured networks have efficient mechanisms to search for a content, but the lookup process does not take advantage of the distributed system nature. In this paper, we propose a hybrid structured and unstructured topology in order to take advantages of both kind of networks. In addition, our proposal guarantees that if a content is at any place in the network, it will be reachable with probability one. Simulation results show that the behaviour of the network is stable and that the network distributes the contents efficiently to avoid network congestion.