A Reliable Peer Connection Scheme for Pure P2P Network Environments

Summary P2P network environments provide users with direct data transmission and sharing facilities and those environments can be classified into hybrid P2P network environments and pure P2P network environments according to the arbitration mechanism among the peers in the network. In hybrid P2P network environments, there exists a server that maintains index information for the data to be shared and network isolation does not occur because every peer always keeps connection to the server. In pure P2P network environments, however, each peer directly connects to another peer and gets services without server intervention, and so, network isolation can occur when the mediating peer fails to work. In this paper, we propose a scheme for each peer to keep connection to other peers continuously by maintaining IP addresses of its neighbor peers and connecting to the peers when the mediating peer fails to work. Although the P2P application that uses our proposed framework should obtain one or more IP addresses of the neighbor peers manually, after instantiation, the application can do its job while maintaining connection to the network continuously and automatically. To evaluate our proposed scheme, we measured and analyzed the time for a peer to reconnect to the network when the mediating peer fails and the network isolation occurs.