An Efficient and Practical Greedy Algorithm for Server-Peer Selection in Wireless Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Networks

Toward a new era of “Ubiquitous Networking” where people are interconnected in anywhere and at anytime via the wired and wireless Internet, we have witnessed an increasing level of impromptu interactions among human beings in recent years. One important aspect of these interactions is the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Networking that is becoming a dominant traffic source in the wired Internet. In these Internet overlay networks, users are allowed to exchange information through instant messaging and file sharing. Unfortunately, most of the previous work proposed in the literature on P2P networking is designed for the traditional wired Internet, without much regard to important issues pertinent to wireless communications. In this paper, we attempt to provide some insight into P2P networking with respect to a wireless environment. We focus on P2P file sharing, already a hot application in the wired Internet, and will be equally important in the wireless counterpart. We propose a greedy server-peer selection algorithm to decide from which peer should a client download files so that the level of fairness of the whole network is increased and expected service life of the whole file sharing network is extended. We also propose a new performance metric called Energy-Based Data Availability, EBDA, which is an important performance metric for improving the effectiveness of a wireless P2P file sharing network.