On neighbor-selection strategy in hybrid peer-to-peer networks

Recently, computer users have increased their interests in downloading large-volume contents like movies and software from the Internet, and a new generation of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-swapping applications that aims at improving the efficiency of transfer are gaining popularity. In these P2P applications, a central “tracker” decides about which peer becomes a neighbor to which other peers. This decision critically dictates the distribution efficiency. In this paper, we investigate the neighbor-selection process in this new category of P2P networks, and we propose an efficient neighbor-selection strategy that performs better than the existing ones. We show that by increasing the content availability of peers from their immediate neighbors, it can significantly improve system performance without trading off users’ satisfaction. We also show that the proposed strategy is incentive-compatible and is suitable for real-time deployment.