An Efficient Search Algorithm in Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Networks

To Design efficient search algorithms is a key challenge in decentralized peer-to-peer networks. Flooding and random walk (RW) are two previous search algorithms. Flooding searches aggressively and covers the most nodes. However, it generates a large amount of query messages and, thus, does not scale. On the contrary, RW searches conservatively. It only generates a fixed amount of query messages at each hop but would take longer search time .The proposed algorithm, which is generalization of flooding and RW. It takes advantage of various contexts under which each previous search algorithm performs well. It resembles flooding for short-term search and RW for long-term search. Moreover, it could be further combined with knowledge-based search mechanisms to improve the search performance. We analyze the performance of the search algorithm based on some performance metrics including the success rate, search time, query hits, query messages, query efficiency, and search efficiency