Peer-to-peer platforms for high-quality web services: the case for load-balanced clustered peer-to-peer systems

This chapter presents a clustered peer-to-peer system as a resource organization structure for webservice hosting platforms where service quality such as response time and service availability are provided with assurance. The peer-to-peer organization allows integration of autonomous resources into a single platform in a scalable manner. In clustered peer-to-peer systems, nodes are organized into clusters based on some proximity metric, and a distributed hash table overlay is created among the clusters. This organization enables lightweight techniques for load balancing among different clusters, which is found to be essential for providing response time guarantees. Service availability is provided by replicating a service instance in multiple nodes in a cluster. A decentralized load balancing technique called diffusive load balancing is presented in the context of clustered peer-to-peer systems and evaluated for effectiveness and performance.