Quick forwarding of queries to relevant peers in a hierarchical P2P file search system

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new file search scheme for a three-tier Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architecture. The proposed scheme consists of two parts. The first part determines a way of associating files held by each peer in the bottom layer to subservers in the middle layer, where each subserver plays the same role with the (centralized) server in conventional search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. The second part provides a way of forwarding a query received by the central server in the top layer to an appropriate subserver relevant to the query. The proposed scheme is based on the notion of "tags", and a technique of priority sequence of tags is introduced to realize a quick forwarding of queries. The result of performance evaluation indicates that the number of tags which must be examined in forwarding a given query is bounded by a small constant. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.