Modeling and analysis of access transparency and scalability in P2P distributed systems

SUMMARY Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have been developed with the goal of providing support for transparent and efficient sharing of scalable distributed resources wherein size scalability is limited by the costs of all types of transparencies, especially data access transparency, which are due to the need for frequent data exchanges between peers and other related communication overheads. We present a model that formulates the relationship between scalability and data access transparency in P2P distributed systems to figure out how large these systems can be scaled up, given the overheads of establishing data access transparency. To validate our model and show how our model can be deployed in real life, we consider a real P2P distributed system as a case study and evaluate how CPU utilization, bandwidth, and data request frequency parameters of our model relate to the amount of effort required by the system management to establish data access transparency. We then calculate the strength of the coefficient of correlation of scalability and data access transparency in the system. The degree of strength of this coefficient allows the system designer to decide at design time whether to allow the use of the model in the management of system at runtime or not. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.