Distributed Algorithms for Improving Search Efficiency in P2P Overlays

Peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay is a distributed application architecture in which peers share their resources. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. Several algorithms for enhancing P2P file searching have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we have proposed a unique approach of reducing the P2P search complexity and improving search efficiency by using distributed algorithms. In our approach a peer mounts other popular peer’s files and also replicates other popular files or critical files identified using a threshold value. Once a file is mounted, file access requests can be serviced by transparently retrieving the file and sending it to the requesting peer. Replication used in this work improves the file retrieval time by allowing parallel transfer. We have shown the performance analysis of our proposed approach which shows improvement in the search efficiency.