PeerCQ is a peer-to-peer Continual Query system for information monitoring on the Internet. 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. In this paper we describe the basic architecture of the PeerCQ system and focus on the mechanisms used for service partitioning and service lookup. There are two unique characteristics
of PeerCQ. First, it introduces a donation based peer-aware mechanism for handling the peer heterogeneity. Second, it integrates CQ-aware and peer-aware information into its service partitioning scheme, while maintaining decentralization and self-configurability. We report a set of initial experiments demonstrating the sensitiveness of our approach to peer heterogeneity and the effectiveness of our service partitioning algorithm with respect to load balancing and system utilization
