Semantic social overlay networks

Peer selection for query routing is a core task in peer-to-peer networks. Unstructured peer-to-peer systems (like Gnutella) ignore this problem, leading to an abundance of network traffic. Structured peer-to-peer systems (like Chord) enforce a particular, global way of distributing data among the peers in order to solve this problem, but then encounter problems of network volatility and conflicts with the autonomy of the peer data management. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism, INGA, which is based on the observation that query routing in social networks is made possible by locally available knowledge about the expertise of neighbors and a semantics-based peer selection function. We validate INGA by simulation experiments with different data sets. We compare INGA with competing peer selection mechanisms on resulting parameters like recall, message gain or number of messages produced.