Improving Conjunctive Query Routing in Unstructured P2P Networks

Approximately 74% of queries in peer-to-peer file sharing systems return no results, wasting both network bandwidth and computational resources. Considering the popularity of this application, this is a significant problem. We propose to improve the accuracy of query routing by improving how file collections are described and defining how peers organize into groups. Our basic approach is to improve the precision of collection description by having each peer partition its collection and describe each collection independently. Experimental results on real peer-to-peer file sharing data shows that our techniques can reduce routing cost to peer groups by 40% with near-perfect load balance.