FLAPS: bandwidth and delay-efficient distributed data searching in fog-supported P2P content delivery networks

.Due to the growing interest for multimedia contents by mobile users, designing bandwidth and delay-efficient distributed algorithms for data searching over wireless (possibly, mobile) “ad hoc” Peer-to-Peer (P2P) content Delivery Networks (CDNs) is a topic of current interest. This is mainly due to the limited computing-plus-communication resources featuring state-of-the-art wireless P2P CDNs. In principle, an effective means to cope with this limitation is to empower traditional P2P CDNs by distributed Fog nodes. Motivated by this consideration, the goal of this paper is twofold. First, we propose and describe the main building blocks of a hybrid (e.g., mixed infrastructure and “ad hoc”) Fog-supported P2P architecture for wireless content delivery, namely, the Fog-Caching P2P architecture. It exploits the topological (possibly, time varying) information locally available at the serving Fog nodes, in order to speed up the data searching operations performed by the served peers. Second, we propose a bandwidth and delay-efficient, distributed and adaptive probabilistic search algorithm, that relies on the learning automata paradigm, e.g., the Fog-supported Learning Automata Adaptive Probabilistic Search (FLAPS) algorithm. The main feature of the FLAPS algorithm is the exploitation of the local topology information provided by the serving Fog nodes and the current status of the collaborating peers, in order to run a suitably distributed reinforcement algorithm for the adaptive discovery of peer-to-peer and peer-to-fog minimum-hop routes. The performance of the proposed FLAPS algorithm is numerically evaluated in terms of Success Rate, Hit-per-Query, Message-per-Query, Response Delay and Message Duplication Factor over a number of randomly generated benchmark CDN topologies. Furthermore, in order to corroborate the actual effectiveness of the FLAPS algorithm, extensive performance comparisons are carried out with some state-of-the-art searching algorithms, namely the Adaptive Probabilistic Search, Improved Adaptive Probabilistic Search and the Random Walk algorithms.