A Cross-Transmission Protocol Architecture Concept for Resource Discovery in P2P Overlay Networks

In this paper, we propose a cross-transmission protocol architecture for resource discovery in P2P overlay networks, where each client in the network can query and get the resource identifiers for other P2P overlay networks (like Infohash in Bittorrent network, AICH Top Hash in Emule/Edonkey network). In this way, client can download files from multi-overlay P2P networks simultaneously rather than from a specific P2P network, which can provide some essential functions to the P2P systems, such as reducing user response latency, minimizing file download time and providing Quality of Services (QoS) guarantees. The core of the proposed architecture is a unified Multi-media Search Engine (MSE) which provides both information collection and information retrieval functions. The data provided to the clients by MSE is only the resource descriptive information for each specific P2P overlay network, so it is easy to implement the architecture without any influence to the original P2P overlay systems.