Design and implementation of an efficient search mechanism based on the hybrid P2P model for ubiquitous computing systems

To realize ubiquitous computing using quite a huge number of computing resources on the Internet, this paper presents an effective computing resource search mechanism based on peer-to-peer (P2P) ad-hoc networking that finds appropriate resource providers for each resource user. The main idea of the proposed mechanism is to classify the attributes of computing resources into two groups: a static attribute group and a dynamic attribute group. The attributes classified into the static attribute group are managed in a centralized manner, while the attributes in the dynamic attribute group are managed in a decentralized manner. In resource searching, this hybrid-type resource management mechanism can limit the candidates based on the static attributes firsts, and then the appropriate resources can be searched according to the dynamic attributes only within the area restricted by the static attributes. Therefore, the mechanism can prevent the network traffic explosion due to the flooding search in native P2P systems. Performance evaluation is carried out theoretically and experimentally. The results of theoretical evaluation indicate that the proposed model is well-suited for the resource search required by the ubiquitous computing, compared with both a typical server-client model and a P2P-based model. Prototyping the proposed mechanism experimentally shows its feasibility.