Searching in variably connected P2P networks

Peer-to-Peer networks are gaining popularity through Me-sharing communities. Most P2P networks demand a certain stability from it's nodes in order to function satisfactory. A variably connected P2P network, however, is a network where the connectivity of nodes might vary greatly over time. The nodes can be in different connection states, such as connected to the Internet or moving between networks as well as ad-hoc or offline operation. Creating a search infrastructure for variably connected P2P networks is challenging, as it will be very hard to keep updated shared state (such as distributed indexes) within the network. Both scalability and stability must be addressed; scalability for large scale overlay networks and in order to handle the large fluctuations in the network. Routing queries in Peer-to-Peer networks based on semantic information looks very promising for solving scalability issues. This paper discusses how a Semantic Query Routing protocol can be extended to solve stability issues and thus better support both mobility and ad-hoc operations. We will make an implementation in the Seers experimental P2P search infrastructure to verify the new protocol.(1).