Social Networks in Peer-to-Peer Systems

The Gnutella protocol requires peers to broadcast messages to their neighbours when they search files. The message passing generates a lot of traffic in the network, which degrades the quality of service. We propose using social networks to optimize the speed of search and to improve the quality of service in a Gnutella based peer-to-peer environment. Once peers generate their "friends lists", they use these lists to semantically route queries in the network. This helps to reduce the search time and to decrease the network traffic by minimizing the number of messages circulating in the system as compared to standard Gnutella. We demonstrate by simulating such an environment with the JADE multi-agent system platform that by learning other peers\´ interests, building and exploiting their social networks (friends lists) to route queries semantically, peers can get more relevant resources faster and with less traffic generated, i.e. that the performance of the Gnutella system can be improved.