WindChimer: The Partially Centralized and Controlled P2P System for Better Discovery

Rich information from various data sources has been recognized for enabling people to perform an efficient decision-making and problem-solving. According to thousands of data sources and numerous information types available at the edge of the Internet, the discovery of all potential data sources are needed to facilitate the procurement of rich information. However, current P2P approaches are limited to the discovery of potential data sources in which the number of data sources does not cause tremendous consequences for decision-making and problem-solving. In this paper, we thus propose WindChimer, a partially centralized and controlled P2P system that hybridly combines network topology of structured and unstructured P2P systems. Our experiments showed that the partially centralized and controlled topology enables an efficient discovery of all potential peers as per a given information type. This was accomplished via (i) acceptable number of messages sent throughout the network; (ii) high messaging accuracy for propagating the message to potential peers; and (iii) effective scalability when adding more peers. However, it is currently applicable for low degree of transient peer population, and sustainable data sources of organizations only.