Reducing the discovery overheads in a DHT based P2P network by using virtual resources

Message delivery mechanism based on distributed hash table (DHT) can cause performance improvement over conventional P2P (Peer-to-Peer) system by increased delivery efficiency. However, the DHT, which is based on hash function, shows a few but important shortcomings: discovery of any resource without the same key value is not possible, and also repetitive discovery steps are required to discover resources with similar names. Therefore, in this research, we propose a simple but effective method which allows us to overcome those limitations of DHT method and to achieve performance enhancement. A virtual resource is not an actual resource, but a resource that acts like a wrapper to the original resources; it represents many similar resources and makes them discovered by a single discovery query. By using a virtual resource, users can obtain a significant improvement not only on performance but also on usability. Also experiment results show that using virtual resources can bring around 30% decrease in overall bandwidth usage and around 70% decrease in discovery time depending on given environment.