An Evaluation Criterion for Adaptive Neighbor Selection in Heterogeneous Peer-to-Peer Networks

The peer-to-peer paradigm potentially enables low-cost and highly scalable distributed systems where user nodes have at the same time the roles of consumer and provider of resources. Nowadays, the computational power and storage capacity of mobile devices has notably increased, for which their inclusion in the physical network that supports P2P overlays can be realistically considered. For those applications where the quality of service is a fundamental constraint, such as live streaming, it is important to have overlay network level strategies to dynamically re-configure the active connections among peers. In this paper we propose a simple but effective strategy for the evaluation of neighbors, taking into account their capabilities, to support the dynamic selection of resource providers. We apply the formal framework to P2P Internet Live Streaming, simulating three realistic scenarios and discussing the results.