Automatic Tuning of File Descriptors in P2P File-Sharing Systems

Peer-to-peer file-sharing systems have poor search performance for rare or poorly described files. These files lack a quality or variety of metadata making them hard to match with queries. A server can alleviate this problem by gathering the descriptors used by peers via what we call probe queries, and use these descriptors to improve its own. We consider probe query triggering mechanisms and criteria for selecting a file for which to probe in this work. Experimental results indicate that probe queries are effective in improving search performance.