Resource sharing architecture for cooperative heterogeneous P2P overlays

Resource requirements and availability in heterogeneous networks may frequently vary over their lifetime; thus producing equally variant overloaded and under-loaded situations. Typical architectures cannot cope with the frequent availability fluctuation of reusable, non-replicable and highly dynamic resources (such as network capacity). This paper proposes an unstructured P2P overlay for sharing resources between underutilized and overloaded networks. Its aim is to satisfy the excessive resource demands of some networks by using free resources from others given the high failure rate and unstable availability of these resources in wide networks. We describe and analyze the proposed Capacity Sharing Overlay Architecture and show, with extensive simulations, its ability to provide remote underutilized capacity to underlying networks, even in the presence of high node failure rates, helping the networks to handle more user queries.