Performance and Design of P2P Networks for Efficient File Sharing

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology enables users to share resources (files or mobile codes) directly with each other instead of requiring a large-capacity server to store the files. However, there are several small-capacity servers called indexes in these networks that index information regarding which peer has what files. In this paper we conduct a performance analysis to obtain response time, jitter and loss probability expressions analytically. We use the results in a mathematical programming problem to determine the optimal number of indexes and time out value. We consider three topological models for the network of peer nodes: Erdös-Rényi, small world, and scale-free.