Towards an effective integration of cellular users to the structured Peer-to-Peer network

Integration of cellular users into the peer-to-peer (P2P) network is still in limbo due to limitations caused by heterogeneity, mobility and time-varying capacities of the wireless channel. If traditional Chord is employed to include users from the cellular networks, users under the same base station scatter in logical topology randomly. In this paper, we present a novel cellular Chord (C-Chord) P2P system that integrates the cellular users into the well-established structured P2P network in a topology-aware fashion. C-Chord offers the cellular users a choice of downloading contents either from the Internet peers at a faster rate or from other cellular users from the same base station avoiding the Internet data penalty. We also incorporate the peer selection module based on stable marriage problem that chooses the appropriate candidate from the discovered potential senders. We conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed C-Chord P2P system and the peer selection module. Simulation results show that the path-length per lookup query is smaller than that of the traditional Chord system. Overhead due to renewal of routing information is also smaller for the cellular users in the C-Chord system. We also measure the throughput at the cellular receivers to analyze the effects of selecting peers either from same base station or from outside the Internet gateway. Throughput also increases dramatically due to an intelligent selection of peers among the potential senders.