Clustering-based source selection for efficient image retrieval in peer-to-peer networks

In peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, computers with equal rights form a logical (overlay) network in order to provide a common service that lies beyond the capacity of every single participant. Efficient similarity search is generally recognized as a frontier in research about P2P systems. One way to address it is using data source selection based approaches where peers summarize the data they contribute to the network, generating typically one summary per peer. When processing queries, these summaries are used to choose the peers (data sources) that are most likely to contribute to the query result. Only those data sources are contacted. There are two main contributions of this paper. We extend earlier work, adding a data source selection method for high-dimensional vector data, comparing different peer ranking schemes. More importantly, we present a method that uses progressive stepwise data exchange between peers to better each peer's summary and therefore improve the system's performance(1).