Report on Unstructured Network in Peer-to-Peer System

In Structured peer-to-peer systems, there are several problems hard to tackle. First, loads on different peers are difficult to balance. Since the peers in the system can be heterogenous, it is not fair to distribute equal load to every peer. In Chord, the authors argued that one peer with large capacity can occupy several nodes on the ring to relieve the pressure on other peers. In fact, there is still a lower bound on the workload and it is difficult to estimate the number of nodes one large peer should take. Second, the communication cost in Structured system can be great. The topology of a Structured peer-to-peer system is decided by the global mapping only. No information about the communication condition among those peers are considered. This may lead to the connection of peers who are far away geographically and great latency during information exchange.