An optimized strategy for update path selection in unstructured P2P networks

With the growth of P2P file sharing systems, people are no longer satisfied with the sharing of the read-only and static files, and thus the systems with mutually writable and dynamic files have emerged, resulting in the replica inconsistency problem. To maintain the replica consistency, too many update messages need to be redundantly propagated due to the lack of the sharing of globally updated path information in the existing strategies. To address this problem, we propose an optimized strategy for update path selection, which makes the nodes share the update path information by using clone, variation and crossover operations for the update paths. We also present a repeated update strategy to cope with the churn problem so as to maintain replica consistency as far as possible even if some nodes temporarily leave the network. The simulation results show that our strategy can significantly reduce the number of the redundant update messages without lowering the message coverage, thus improving the availability of the unstructured P2P networks.