Search in unstructured peer-to-peer networks

Unstructured Peer-to-Peer (hence P2P) applications, such as KaZaa, Gnutella, etc. are very popular on the Internet over the last few years. Search method is a major component of these distributed systems and its efficiency also does influence-the systems performance. An efficient technique for improving performance of search method is to replicate file location information in P2P networks. Unstructured P2P topology has power-law characteristic in the link distribution, so we present a replica spread mechanism utilizing high degree nodes in this paper. Based on this spread mechanism, we proposed two search methods. Extensive simulation results show that they performs very well on the power-law networks, achieve high success rates, and are robust to node failure.