Acquaintance-based protocol for manipulating multimedia objects in peer-to-peer overlay networks

Various types of multimedia objects are manipulated on peer computers (peers) in peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks. An application has to find target peers which can support enough quality of service (QoS) of multimedia objects. We discuss types of acquaintance relations of peers with respect to types of objects and access rights. We discuss a charge-based flooding (CBF) algorithm to find target peers based on charge and acquaintance concepts so that areas in networks where target peers are expected to exist are more deeply searched. We evaluate the CBF algorithm compared with TTL-based flooding algorithms in terms of the number of messages.