An efficient random walks based approach to reducing file locating delay in unstructured P2P network

Random walks are an excellent search mechanism in unstructured P2P network. However, it suffers long delay when searching files, especially for uncommon files. An efficient search mechanism - ARW is presented. ARW utilizes path information carrying and walker self-replication technologies to increase the number of different peers all walkers visit and reduces the delay which random walks spends on searching files especially for uncommon files greatly. Experimental results show that ARW reduces the delay of random walks on searching uncommon files by 63.7% with almost no extra overhead in a Gnutella-like overlay network and gets a good tradeoff between performance and overhead.