Distributed Search and Pattern Matching

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has triggered a wide range of distributed applications including file-sharing, distributed XML databases, distributed computing, server-less web publishing and networked resource/service sharing. Despite of the diversity in application, these systems share common requirements for searching due to transitory nodes population and content volatility. In such dynamic environment, users do not have the exact information about available resources. Queries are based on partial information. This mandates the search mechanism to be flexible. On the other hand, the search mechanism is required to be bandwidth efficient to support large networks. Variety of search techniques have been proposed to provide satisfactory solution to the conflicting requirements of search efficiency and flexibility. This chapter highlights the search requirements in large scale distributed systems and the ability of the existing distributed search techniques in satisfying these requirements. Representative search techniques from three application domains, namely, P2P content sharing, service discovery and distributed XML databases, are considered. An abstract problem formulation called Distributed Pattern Matching (DPM) is presented as well. The DPM framework can be used as a common ground for addressing the search problem in these three application domains.