Survey of Various Search Mechanisms in Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks

Abstract

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) [1] are widely used for file sharing purposes. This type of usage provides decentralized solutions over centralized complex architecture. Peer-to-Peer networks are gaining attention from both the scientific perspective as well as the large Internet community. Popular applications utilizing this new technology offer many attractive features to a growing number of users. P2P is an architecture which is all-together a different class of applications that use the concept of distributed resources to perform an important crucial function in a decentralized manner. The popularity and bandwidth consumption attributed to current Peer-to-Peer filesharing applications makes the operation of these distributed systems very important for the Internet community. Efficiently discovering the queried resource is the initial and most important step in establishing an efficient peer-to-peer communication. Here, we will be describing and analyzing the performances of some existing search mechanisms deployed for the peer discovery and the content look up.