On Increasing Information Availability in Gnutella-Like Peer-to-Peer Networks

In this paper, we address some of the problems such as dead searches, complexity in the study of network topology and network overloading that are associated with Gnutella and Gnutella-like peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. We use advanced heuristic parameters with information shuffling as a solution for them. We propose an advancement of Gnutella using the above-mentioned schemes. At a panoramic level, our work is founded on the following concepts: (a) Crawling the P2P networks to shuffle information, so that the knowledge is distributed over the whole network, and (b) Bringing the information within searchable hops of each network. These have been verified on a self-built P2P simulator, named PeerNS, which works on actual P2P network statistics and is, hence, very close to the actual scenario. The results obtained through simulation affirm that the nodes with extremely large number of dead searches benefit the most and are observed to have a sharp decrease in their dead search count after crawling a small part of the overall network.