Supporting efficient keyword-based file search in peer-to-peer file sharing systems

摘要

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing has become a popular distributed computing paradigm thanks to the abundant computing power of modern desktop workstations and widely available network connectivity. Although P2P file sharing provides a scalable alternative to conventional server-based approaches, providing efficient file search in a large-scale dynamic P2P system remains a challenging problem. We propose a set of mechanisms to provide a scalable keyword-based file search in distributed hash table (DHT) based P2P systems. Our proposed architecture, called keyword fusion, balances unfair storage consumptions at peers and transforms users' queries to contain focused search terms. Through trace-driven simulations, we show that keyword fusion can reduce the storage consumption of the top 5% most loaded nodes by 50% and decrease the search traffic by up to 67%, even in a modest scenario of combining two keywords.