ASAP Top-k Query Processing in Unstructured P2P Systems

Top-k query processing techniques are useful in unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, to avoid overwhelming users with too many results. However, existing approaches suffer from long waiting times. This is because top-k results are returned only when all queried peers have finished processing the query. As a result, query response time is dominated by the slowest queried peer. In this paper, we address this users´ waiting time problem. For this, we revisit top-k query processing in P2P systems by introducing two novel notions in addition to response time: the stabilization time and the cumulative quality gap. Using these notions, we formally define the as-soon-as-possible (ASAP) top-k processing problem. Then, we propose a family of algorithms called ASAP to deal with this problem. We validate our solution through implementation and extensive experimentation. The results show that ASAP significantly outperforms baseline algorithms by re- turning final top-k result to users in much better times.