A Membership Management Mechanism for Large Scale P2P Environment

Node topology plays an important role in P2P-based systems. It serves as a basis to support application functions, and has major impact on their efficiency, cost and robustness. Membership management can construct node topology according to application’s semantic requirements by maintaining neighbor view on every node. However, large-scale P2P environment with the features of dynamic node joining/leaving, dynamic network condition fluctuation, dynamic resources varying and a large number of nodes, greatly challenges the perturbation-resistance and scalability of membership management. Many typical membership management techniques either ignored the issue of system perturbation, or ignored the issue of system size’s expansion/shrinking, and can’t work well in large-scale P2P environment. In this paper, a new membership management mechanism considering multiple factors of dynamic variation is given to maintain stable node topology in harsh environment. The proposed mechanism mainly consists of perturbation-resisted membership discovery protocol and scalable membership maintenance method. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Some useful conclusions obtained through the analysis of the experimental data lay a solid foundation for further research.