Efficient super-peer-based coordinated service provision

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have been applied in many applications for sharing resources such as storage space, media files or network bandwidth. Their main benefits include decentralization, self-organization, and scalability. Moreover, P2P technologies are evolving towards hybrid systems, where P2P networks are used in those parts of a larger system to leverage the decentralization most efficiently. The examples include cloud computing, where P2P networks are used in sharing computing resources, and Machine-to-Machine communication, where P2P networks are used for resource discovery. In super-peer overlays, the nodes are either regular nodes or super nodes that are located higher in the node hierarchy. This type of overlay explores the heterogeneity of peers in the overlay network to enable applications to run more efficiently. Leveraging the advantage of a super-peer overlay for service provision is an important issue. This thesis contributes to the research and development of super-peer-based coordination service provision from three aspects. Firstly, a super-peer-based coordinated service provision framework is proposed to coordinate different service groups and service peers in resource sharing, aiming to enable service groups to adapt to dynamic service demands. The proposed framework is evaluated using the following performance metrics: service response time, scalability, robustness, and communication traffic, in comparison to related work. Secondly, an efficient algorithm for rapidly constructing a robust super-peer overlay is proposed. The algorithm introduces a super-peer candidate based method for super-peer selection and a two-hop search method for finding client peers. Performance evaluation takes into account the convergence time of building a super-peer overlay, communication overhead, scalability, robustness. A comparison to related work is also conducted. Thirdly, the architecture of distributed resource discovery based on P2P overlay for Machineto-Machine service provision is proposed. The architecture supports heterogeneous devices using different communication protocols in resource registration and discovery for achieving interoperability. As a part of the thesis, a functional real-world prototype is implemented and verified with a simple demonstration. Preliminary evaluation on the prototype indicates that caching can improve the response time of resource lookup dramatically.