Service Providers Indexing Using P2P Systems
The idea of sharing resources across the network has become very popular during the last few years, leading to a diversified scenario in which shared resources include not only files and videos but also storage and CPU cycles. A new trend is to extend this paradigm toward a distributed architecture in which multiple network nodes cooperate to provide services in a distributed fashion, thus ensuring robustness and scalability. Peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are the natural solution to achieve this goal as, thanks to their simplicity and flexibility, they can change their topology in order to fit the needs of the different kinds of services that can be provided on top of them. This chapter focuses on the indexing of nodes (i.e., the service providers) in these P2P systems, presenting the state-of-the-art solutions concerning the P2P-based indexing architectures and a taxonomy of possible services that can be built upon different overlay structures. Finally, emphasis is given to mechanisms implementing service selection based on some cost parameters (e.g., topological proximity) in order to introduce some mechanism based on optimality in case multiple service providers exist.