From inter-connecting P2P overlays to co-operating P2P systems

Peer-to-peer systems are used by millions of users every day. In many scenarios, it is desirable for the users from different P2P systems to communicate and exchange content or services with each other. This requires co-operation between the P2P systems, which is often difficult or impossible, due to the two following reasons. First is the lack of an inter-overlay routing infrastructure throughout these systems, caused by the incompatibilities in overlay networks on top of which they are built. Second, there are incompatibilities in the application protocols of these systems. The main topic of this thesis is enabling the cooperation between P2P systems. The thesis introduces a cooperation framework for backward-compatible cooperating heterogeneous P2P systems which constitutes two parts. The first one is an inter-overlay routing framework which allows to inter-routing between heterogeneous overlay networks. The second one is the cooperation application, built on the top of the inter-overlay routing framework, which aims at solving the incompatibilities in the application protocols of P2P systems. As a case study of the cooperation framework, we introduce a complete solution for cooperating P2P file-sharing networks which is applicable for all current P2P file-sharing networks. In the second topic of this thesis, we investigate a case study of using inter-connecting P2P overlays for collecting and managing data in smart grid, a typical example of cyber physical system.