A Comparative Investigation on Different P2P Search Systems in Dynamic Environments

Recently, peer-to-peer (P2P) search technique has become popular in the Web as an alternative to centralized search due to its high scalability and low deployment-cost. Various P2P search systems have been proposed to support full-text search. However, P2P search systems are known to suffer from the problem of peer dynamics, such as frequent peer churn and content evolution, which cause serious performance degradation. Up to date, no prior research has been conducted on investigating the impact of peer dynamics in P2P full-text search systems. In this paper, we compare four existing representative P2P search systems, each of which relies on a distinctive architecture. During our experiments, we mainly focus on evaluating the cost and search effectiveness of all systems in a dynamic environment. The comparison results demonstrate that HAPS, proposed on our previous work, outperforms the other three systems in the environment with peer dynamics.