A self-organization mechanism based on cross-entropy method for P2P-like applications

P2P-like applications are quickly gaining popularity in the Internet. Such applications are commonly modeled as graphs with nodes and edges. Usually nodes represent running processes that exchange information with each other through communication channels as represented by the edges. They often need to autonomously determine their suitable working mode or local status for the purpose of improving performance, reducing operation cost, or achieving system-level design goals. In order to achieve this objective, the concept of status configuration is introduced in this article and a mathematical correspondence is further established between status configuration and an optimization index (OI), which serves as a unified abstraction of any system design goals. Guided by this correspondence and inspired by the cross-entropy algorithm, a cross-entropy-driven self-organization mechanism (CESM) is proposed in this article. CESM exhibits the self-organization property since desirable status configurations that lead to high OI values will quickly emerge from purely localized interactions. Both theoretical and experimental analysis have been performed. The results strongly indicate that CESM is a simple yet effective technique which is potentially suitable for many P2P-like applications.