Efficient query routing by improved peer description in P2P networks

Peer-to-peer file-sharing systems commonly use the set-of-terms model – the union of the terms in the shared files – to describe succinctly a peer’s shared files. This information is shared with neighbors who use it to guide query routing decisions. The problem with this model, however, is that it falsely suggests term cooccurrences that do not exist in any single file. Consequently, queries get routed erroneously to peers that have no matching files, wasting network and computation resources in the process. We reduce the amount of co-occurrence errors by partitioning each peer’s file set and representing the peer as several file partitions instead of one. Experimental evidence demonstrates that it is possible to reduce the network traffic between neighbors by over 50% at virtually no cost.