Information Sciences: an International Journal
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The dynamics of peers, namely Churn, is an inherent property of peer-to-peer (P2P) systems and is critical to their design and evaluation. Although every excellent P2P protocol has some solution to this issue, studies on Churn are still seldom. This paper studies various factors related to Churn, and uses them to analyze and evaluate P2P protocols. Prior researches on Churn are all based on the P2P network factors in Churn environment, and their difference is whether to use these factors as predecessor references to build Churn analytical models or as successor references to test the models. According to this difference, this paper first divides various factors into two categories: impacting Churn and affected by Churn. There is a causal relationship between these two categories. Factors impacting Churn are cause, and the factors affected by Churn are effect. In this paper, we use this causality to simulate and analyze P2P Churn. Cause is used as the input data and effect is used as the output result. Second, based on the classification of Churn factors, we present a performance evaluation framework and two comparing models. Based on the framework and models, we simulate and analyze three P2P protocols and get some useful results such as the performance of these protocols under Churn, the advantage of Chord over others, and the most important factors impacting Churn. Finally, we present a method to improve recent P2P Churn models by adding some influence factors. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.