Building semantic peer-to-peer networks upon CAN

Abstract

Existing decentralized architectures for peer-to-peer (P2P) networks can be generally partitioned into two categories: unstructured (such as Gnutella) and structured (such as CAN, Chord, Pastry and Tapestry). Based on Content Addressable Networks (CAN), we propose a hybrid scheme for building Semantic Peer-to-peer Networks (SPNs) where semantically related nodes are connected to each other. The entire peer-to-peer overlay networks are overlapped by many SPNs and all these SPNs are logically organized into a hierarchy. Then we provide a searching algorithm to "focus" query propagation only in appropriate SPNs. As a result, the nodes visited for a lookup can be reduced by several orders of magnitude compared to Gnutella. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.