Supporting efficient keyword-based file search in peer-to-peer file sharing systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing has become a popular distributed computing paradigm thanks to the abundant computing power of modern desktop workstations and widely available network connectivity. Although P2P file sharing provides a scalable alternative to conventional server-based approaches, providing efficient file search in a large-scale dynamic P2P system remains a challenging problem. We propose a set of mechanisms to provide a scalable keyword-based file search in distributed hash table (DHT) based P2P systems. Our proposed architecture, called keyword fusion, balances unfair storage consumptions at peers and transforms users´ queries to contain focused search terms. Through trace-driven simulations, we show that keyword fusion can reduce the storage consumption of the top 5% most loaded nodes by 50% and decrease the search traffic by up to 67%, even in a modest scenario of combining two keywords.