A Hierarchical Architecture for Real-Time Search in Peer-to-Peer Networks

In this paper, we propose a hierarchical architecture to realize a real-time file search in P2P systems. The proposed architecture consists of three layers. Index of files held by the peers in the bottom layer is stored at the peers in the middle layer, and the correlation of peers in the two bottom layers is controlled by the peers in the top layer using the notion of tags. With such notion of tags, we can realize a quick upload of the file indexes and a quick forwarding of a given query requesting a shared file to a relevant peer. We implemented a prototype of the proposed system. The result of preliminary experiments conducted using the prototype system indicates that an upload of a file index and a query forwarding to a relevant peer take few second and 100 ms, respectively.