A Modular Paradigm for Building Self-Organizing Peer-to-Peer Applications

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has undergone rapid growth, producing new protocols and applications, many of which enjoy considerable commercial success and academic interest. Yet, P2P applications are often based on com- plex protocols, whose behavior is not completely understood. We believe that in order to enable an even more widespread adoption of P2P systems in commer- cial and scientific applications, what is needed is a modular paradigm in which well-understood, predictable components with clean interfaces can be combined to implement arbitrarily complex functions. The goal of this paper is to promote this idea by describing our initial experiences in this direction. Our recent work has resulted in a collection of simple and robust components, which include ag- gregation and membership management. This paper shows how to combine them to obtain a novel load-balancing algorithm that is close to optimal with respect to load transfer. We also describe briefly our simulation environment, explicitly designed to efficiently support our modular approach to P2P protocol design.