Peer-to-peer content sharing in wireless networks

A very efficient peer-to-peer application layer architecture is analyzed as a potential candidate for wireless peer-to-peer applications. Its performance in terms of generated traffic and load balance are simulated for different network sizes. A number of candidate cluster topologies are proposed. Based on the simulation results, the optimal cluster topology and cluster size are identified. We conclude that cluster sizes that are the square root of the number of nodes generate uniform traffic. The cluster topology should be star, ring or a compromise between the two, 'planned N'. We show that, for these topologies, the traffic increases less than linearly with the number of nodes in the network, making it highly scalable. Our conclusions are valid for uniform query and update distributions. In addition to the approach from earlier work (Csucs, G. et al., 2002), maintenance aspects are also dealt with; we briefly describe the basic link management procedures that make such networks feasible, but we do not cover their performance analysis. Neither do we treat query topologies.