PARM: A PHYSICALLY-AWARE REFERENCE MODEL FOR PEER-TO-PEER OVERLAY INTERNETWORKING

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies developed rapidly in different directions with various applications and routing mechanisms. Each of them deals with a particular task, and/or provides a specific service. They were developed separately without a unified architecture taking into account all the performance factors of a P2P system. This makes the P2P systems incomplete and their performances far from optimal. This trend also restricts the interoperability amongst the systems because of the lack of standardization in functional architectures of the P2P systems. As a result, tangible benefits for Internet users are limited because the edge-Internet resources are not sharable amongst the systems. Inspired by TCP/IP model, this paper introduces PARM: a Physically-Aware Reference Model for Overlay Internetworking, which is an open reference structure for designing better performance P2P systems. PARM divides major functional P2P system tasks into layers so that they can be tackled individually and efficiently. A Peer Name Service was developed to evaluate the model. The service interprets peer names into their current locations. Simulation results indicate that PARM helps to produce excellent performance overlays. The overlays can achieve desirable features such as decentralization, self-organization, scalability, low overhead and minimal delay penalty.