PIC - a Peer-to-Peer Protocol for Mobile Devices

Abstract

In wireless and especially mobile communications the bandwidth and the amount of transferred data become key aspects. Due to the bandwidth limitations wireless devices may join P2P (Peer-to-Peer) content sharing networks only for a limited time period. Enhancements and possibly new protocols are necessary for wireless peer-to-peer applications. Introducing intelligent search/indexing techniques we can reduce the amount of traffic in the network and balance user load (with some additional cost of implementation complexity). The Parallel Index Cluster (PIC) approach is proposed as an efficient candidate, as a network traffic reduction is expected with at least one order of magnitude compared to basic and enhanced Gnutella networks [1]. In this article a new modeling of P2P systems, the SIL (Search Index Link) [2] method is described, and based on this a new P2P protocol is introduced, which is suitable for mobile devices. For this new protocol (PIC) different cluster topologies are analyzed. To produce minimal network traffic, simulation results and mathematical analysis are given to optimize the cluster sizes in the network.