AntSearch: An Ant Search Algorithm in Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks

The most prevalent peer-to-peer (P2P) application till today is file sharing, and unstructured P2P networks can support inherent heterogeneity of peers, are highly resilient to peers’ failures, and incur low overhead at peer arrivals and departures. Dynamic querying (DQ) is a new flooding technique which could estimate a proper time-to-live (TTL) value for a query flooding by estimating the popularity of the searched files, and retrieve sufficient results under controlled flooding range for reducing network traffic. Recent researches show that a large amount of peers in the P2P file sharing system are the free-riders, and queries are seldom hit by those peers. The free-riders problem causes a large amount of redundant messages in the DQ-like search algorithm. In this paper, we proposed a new search algorithm, called "AntSearch", to solve the problem. In AntSearch, each peer maintains its hit rate of previous queries, and records a list of pheromone values of its immediate neighbors. Based on the pheromone values, a query is only flooded to those peers which are not likely to be the free-riders. Our simulation results show that, compared with DQ and its enhanced algorithm DQ+, the AntSearch algorithm averagely reduces 50% network traffic at almost the same search latency as DQ+, while retrieving sufficient results for a query with a given required number of results.