Query decomposition method for multi-keyword search in P2P systems

A problem of multi-keyword search in a structured peer-to-peer (P2P) distributed computing system is considered. Methods have been developed to employ term-set indexing in a P2P system. Such an approach is an attempt to avoid excessive communication cost incurred by intersection operations in a single-term indexing method. In addition to limiting the maximum term-set size, index pruning was proposed to avoid exponential growth of the term-set index size. However, to obtain a global search result, query decomposition and query result intersection operations are still needed when the number of query terms exceeds the maximum term-set size. With index pruning employed, how a multi-term query is decomposed and affects the quality of retrieval results in terms of recall and precision is shown. A near-optimal query decomposition method is proposed to alleviate such a problem. Results from the simulation demonstrate the improvement gained by the proposed method.