Emergence of Superpeer Networks: A New Perspective

In superpeer based p2p networks, the superpeer nodes are discovered through the process of bootstrapping, whereby resourceful peers get upgraded to superpeers. However, bootstrapping is influenced by several factors like limitation on the maximum number of connections a peer can have due to bandwidth constraints, limitation on the availability of information of existing peers due to cache size constraints and also by the attachment policy of the newly arriving peers to the resourceful peers. In this talk we propose an analytical framework which explains the emergence of superpeer networks on execution of the commercial peer-to-peer bootstrapping protocols by incoming nodes. Bootstrapping protocols exploit physical properties of the online peers like resource content, processing power, storage space, connectivity etc as well as take the finiteness of bandwidth of each online peer into consideration. With the help of rate equations, we show that execution of these protocols results in the emergence of superpeer nodes in the network - the exact degree distribution is evaluated. We also show that the cache parameters must also be suitably tuned so as to increase the fraction of superpeers in the network. We validate the developed framework through extensive simulation. The analysis of the results shows that the amount of superpeers produced in the network depends on the protocol as well as the properties of the joining nodes. As an application study, we show that our framework can explain the topological configuration of commercial Gnutella networks.