PEER-TO-PEER SYSTEM AND METHOD WITH IMPROVED UTILIZATION

摘要

An architecture for a peer-to-peer network (100) is disclosed to advantageously improve system utilization. Each node (110) in the peer-to-peer network is assigned a number or fixed-size storage slots (111) proportional to the node storage, with a first portion being allocated to storage zones and a second portion being allocated as free slot reserves. As more data is added to each storage zone, the zone can be split with a portion of the data transferred to a free slot reserve which then becomes a new storage zone. When no more free slot reserves are available at a node, a storage zone can be transferred to another node (305).