Assisted peer-to-peer search with partial indexing

—In the past few years, peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have become a promising paradigm for building a wide variety of distributed systems and applications. The most popular P2P application till today is file sharing, e.g., Gnutella, Kazza, etc. These systems are usually referred to as unstructured, and search in unstructured P2P networks usually involves flooding or random walking. On the other hand, in structured P2P networks (DHTs), search is usually performed by looking up a distributed inverted index. The efficiency of the search mechanism is the key to the scalability of a P2P content sharing system. So far, neither unstructured nor structured P2P networks alone can solve the search problem in a satisfactory way. In this paper, we propose to combine the strengths of both unstructured and structured P2P networks to achieve more efficient search. Specifically, we propose to enhance search in unstructured P2P overlay networks by building a partial index of shared data using a structu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Rongmei Zhang, Y. Charlie Hu
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2005, Structured P2p Network, Unstructured P2p, Unstructured P2p Networks