Queuing Models for Peer-to-peer Systems

Joint work with Taoyu Li and Maoke Chen from Tsinghua University, and Dah-ming Chiu from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Recent development of peer-to-peer (P2P) services (e.g. streaming, file sharing, and storage) systems introduces a new type of queue systems that are rarely studied before. In these new systems, both customer and server arrive and depart randomly. The server dynamics may or may not correlate to the customer dynamics. Motivated by these observations, we develop queuing models for P2P service systems and a taxonomy for different variations of these queueing models. For several basic classes of these systems, we show that they are stable, i.e., all arriving customer will be served and cleared in finite time, if the average workload does not exceed the average system service capacity. Numerical experiments verify our results, and indicate that higher server dynamics lead to less time a customer spends in the system on average.

These new models open the door for performance characterization for networked service systems under dynamics.

Publications

  • T. Li, Minghua Chen, D. Chiu, and M. Chen, “Queuing Models for Peer-to-peer Systems”, Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS 2009), Boston, MA, USA, April 21, 2009. [PDF]