ProFID: Practical Frequent Item Set Discovery in Peer-to-Peer Networks

This study addresses the problem of discovering frequent items in unstructured P2P networks. This problem is relevant for several distributed services such as cache management, data replication, sensor networks and security. We make three contributions to the current state of the art. First, we propose a fully distributed Protocol for Frequent Item Set Discovery (ProFID) where the result is produced at every peer. ProFID uses a novel pairwise averaging function and network size estimation together to discover frequent items in an unstructured P2P network. We also propose a practical rule for convergence of the algorithm. Finally, we evaluate the efficiency of our approach through an extensive simulation study on PeerSim and present our conclusions.