PeerCQ is a totally decentralized system that performs information
monitoring tasks over a network of peers with heterogeneous
capabilities. It uses Continual Queries (CQs) as its primitives to
express information-monitoring requests. A primary objective of the
PeerCQ system is to build a decentralized Internet scale distributed
information-monitoring system, which is highly scalable,
self-configurable and supports efficient and robust way of processing
CQs. This paper describes the basic architecture of the PeerCQ system
and focuses on the mechanisms used for service partitioning at the P2P
protocol layer. There are three unique characteristics of PeerCQ. First,
it introduces a donation based peer-aware mechanism for handling the
peer heterogeneity. Second, it integrates both the peer heterogeneity
and the information monitoring characteristics of the users into its
service-partitioning scheme, while maintaining decentralization and
self-configurability. Third, the PeerCQ service-partitioning scheme is
able to provide a good balance between system utilization and load
balance in the presence of peer joins, departures and failures. We
report a set of initial experiments demonstrating the sensitiveness of
the PeerCQ approach to large-scale peer-to-peer information monitoring
and the effectiveness of the PeerCQ service-partitioning algorithms with
respect to load balancing and system utilization. |