DCMP: A Distributed Cycle Minimization Protocol for Peer-to-Peer Networks

Broadcast-based Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks, including flat (e.g., Gnutella) and two-layer super-peer implementations (e.g., Kazaa), are extremely popular nowadays due to their simplicity, ease of deployment and versatility. The unstructured network topology, however, contains many cyclic paths which introduce numerous duplicate messages in the system. While such messages can be identified and ignored, they still consume a large proportion of the bandwidth and other resources, causing bottlenecks in the entire network. In this paper the authors describe DCMP, a dynamic, fully decentralized protocol which reduces significantly the duplicate messages by eliminating unnecessary cycles.