A resource donation based approach to load balancing of peer-to-peer overlay networks

Distributed hash table (DHT) is the current emerging technology among the peer-to-peer computing research community, due to their scalability, self organization and the lookup efficiency. However, load balancing is an issue in these DHT based peer-to-peer overlay networks. Some nodes are mapped with more data keys, and some are mapped with less data keys regardless of their heterogeneous capabilities, resulting in overloaded and under-loaded nodes. In this paper we describe a resource donation based approach to the load balancing of current DHT based overlay networks. Our approach assigns node identifiers by considering heterogeneous capabilities of the nodes. Nodes which donate more resources are assigned with more node identifiers. This kind of resource donation based multiple node identifiers assigning approach to the load balancing is not well known among the DHT research community. We use the DHT protocol Cycloid to evaluate our approach to load balancing. The simulation results show that this approach is capable of balancing the load on a node due to the key distribution when node heterogeneous capabilities are taken into account, and this also improves the overall lookup efficiency. (7 pages)