Indexing through Querying in Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Overlay Networks

Abstract

The efficiency of a Peer-to-Peer file sharing overlay is measured in terms of the scalability and versatility of its object lookup strategy. In these networks peers carry out distributed query relaying to discover the service providers. Existing lookup mechanisms like flooding and random walks in unstructured P2P overlays create huge communication overhead and increased response time. In this work we propose efficient lookup in unstructured peer-to-peer overlay networks using indexing through querying, distributing indices through queries. Our simulation studies show that by our approach more than 97% of the queries are answered in one hop and the rest in few hops thus reducing the network load. Our approach is efficient in worst case scenarios where contents are distributed over thousands of peers and the overlay network condition is highly dynamic.