Scoped broadcast in structured P2P networks

Abstract

DHT-based structured P2P networks have difficulties in supporting complex queries due to the use of hashing. A work around is to use flooding, as in unstructured P2P networks, to disseminate the queries. The question is how to reach a sufficient number of nodes so that the query may be answered. A k-node scoped broadcast is a broadcast operation that reaches at least k nodes. It can be controlled by setting an appropriate TTL value. Because of the dynamic nature of P2P networks, the TTL value must be chosen carefully to reach at least k nodes while keeping the number of messages to a minimum. In this paper, we investigate ways of performing k-node scoped broadcast in DHT-based P2P networks. We evaluate our approaches through simulations.