Marco Ballette

Service-Driven Group Management for Mobile P2P Services

Given the considerable trend towards multi-party, peer-to-peer (P2P) communication, many are looking at the P2P computing paradigm as the means to extend the capability and scalability of Internet-based services. Current P2P frameworks are, however, largely incompatible with each other and do not address all the requirements of mobile computing. Here we propose a novel solution to peer group management which is ‘autonomic’, ‘mobile friendly’ and ‘service driven’. We illustrate how our approach facilitates mobile P2P services by managing peer groups based on service semantics and resource availability. Our system allows efficient ‘deep’ search of user personal content stored in thin mobile terminals. Results are based on an experimental prototype and are demonstrated by a simple proof-of-concept mobile service.

JavaSpace : when agents meet peers

The Peer-to-Peer (P2P) model has been proven to overcome some of the main limitations of the client-server approach, including the presence of single points of failure, the appearance of bottlenecks around the server and inefficient resource utilization at the edge of the network. P2P technologies, initially fostered by the success of music file sharing applications, have now reached a widespread adoption in a range of domains. MAs are naturally geared to realize peer entities that can move and be discovered, adding an extra dimension to conventional P2P approaches. In this paper we look at how a combination of a particular P2P system (JavaSpace) and MA technologies can provide additional benefits in terms of fault-tolerance, recovery, scalability and load balancing. Through an experimental approach, we illustrate the benefits of the combined MA/P2P approach. Our initial findings indicate that a coherent merge between P2P and MA technologies have enormous potential in the context of mobile distributed computing.