Cluster Based Peers Configuration using HCNP in Peer-to-Peer Overlay Networks

The paper addresses the need of efficient collaboration of peers with different levels of heterogeneity in order to share resources in p2p overlay networks. Here the heterogeneity reflects differences in peers physical resources like free storage space, processor speed etc. A non-hierarchical cluster-based approach has been introduced to make the network comprising of heterogeneous nodes, more efficient and scalable. NP (newscast protocol) has been used to generate the nodes (peers) randomly in the network, where nodes also maintain the properties of its neighboring nodes in a cache associated to each node. NP has proved to be the most efficient protocol to maintain the current state of the network. In this paper a heterogeneous cluster-based NP (HCNP) has been introduced, which, not only preserves the properties of NP, but also configures clusters on the basis of changes in physical parameters of the node at any particular time instant.