Adaptive sharing of large resources in P2P networks

A peer-to-peer(P2P) system comprises a network of nodes that are capable of sharing and exchanging resources with one another. Recent studies of P2P networks show that many resources exchanged between users are considerably large files that require significant download times, consume the majority of the network bandwidth, and also occupy substantial storage space on the node providing the resource. In such a scenario, it would be inefficient for a node to store a large resource that is rarely, or never requested by other nodes, or, to share a large resource with a node that is already acquiring the resource from another source. These inefficiences can be mitigated if a node dynamically determines and updates its decision to store and share large resources. Here, we describe an agent enabled adaptive strategy for a node to share large resources based on the expected availability of the resource in the network. Experimental results of our adaptive sharing strategy show that a saving of 8-12 downloads/resource, accounting for 50-70 MB of saved data transfer/resource, can be achieved without performance deterioration in the P2P network.