Processing Search Requests and Reply Messages in Pure Peer-to-Peer Networks

The peer-to-peer communication model has gained much attention within the last few years. This was due to its decentralized nature that offered solutions to some of the problems of centralized systems. One of the most popular fields of P2P is file sharing. An important aspect about file-sharing P2P applications is the search technique. The research reported in this paper targets the issue of search efficiency in pure P2P networks. The study proposes a new idea to improve search efficiency in terms of response time and the number of messages sent over the network. In the proposed technique, which is the direct reply system, replies to queries are directly sent to the original source node of the query, instead of routing them back on the same path that the request messages travelled on. The paper presents the simulation that was carried out to test the proposed technique.