2009 Volume E92.D Issue 2 Pages 258-268
Resource search is a fundamental problem in large-scale and highly dynamic Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems. Unstructured search approaches are widely used because of their flexibility and robustness. However, such approaches incur high communication cost. The index-dissemination-based search is a kind of efficient unstructured search approach. We investigate such approaches with respect to minimize the system communication cost. Based on a dynamic system model that peers continuously leave and join, we solve two problems. One problem is how to efficiently disseminate and maintain a given number of indices. Another is to determine the optimal number of indices for each resource object of a given popularity. Finally, we propose an optimized index dissemination scheme which is fully decentralized and self-adaptive. A remarkable advantage is that the scheme yields no additional communication cost to achieve the self-adaptive feature.