Cost-Effective Replication Schemes for Query Load Balancing in DHT-Based Peer-to-Peer File Searches

In past few years, distributed hash table (DHT)-based P2P systems have been proven to be a promising way to manage decentralized index information and provide efficient lookup services. However, the skewness of users' preferences regarding keywords contained in a multi-keyword query causes a query load imbalance that combines both routing and response load. This imbalance means long file retrieval latency that negatively influences the overall system performance. Although index replication has a great potential for alleviating this problem, existing schemes did not explicitly address it or incurred high cost. To overcome this issue, we propose, in this paper, an integrated solution that consists of three replication schemes to alleviate query load imbalance while minimizing the cost. The first scheme is an active index replication that is used in order to decrease routing load in the system and to distribute response load of an index among peers that store replicas of the index. The second scheme is a proactive pointer replication that places location information of each index to a predetermined number of peers for reducing maintenance cost between the index and its replicas. The third scheme is a passive index replication that guarantees the maximum query load of peers. The result of simulations indicates that the proposed schemes can help alleviate the query load imbalance of peers. Moreover, it was found by comparison that our schemes are more cost-effective on placing replicas than PCache and EAD.