Proactive Search Routing for Mobile Peer-to-Peer Networks: Zone-based P2P

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks without central entities, such as Gnutella or JXTA, generally suffer from a high signaling load resulting in poor efficiency. The main reason therefore is the flooding of search requests in the overlay, since in most P2P protocols the nodes are not aware of the P2P overlay network topology. Especially for resource constrained environments such as mobile communications this search overhead should be minimized. This paper addresses the application-layer routing problem, by proposing a new P2P search routing protocol, the Zone-based P2P protocol (ZP2P). ZP2P establishes a zone for every peer. In its zone the peer knows the complete P2P overlay network topology and the available content. If a requested content is not available in its zone, bordercast messages are used, to search for the content in neighboring zones. Employing these concepts, ZP2P achieves a notably improved signaling performance, compared to other unstructured P2P routing approaches such as Gnutella 0.4 or Gnutella 0.6. As a proof of concept, we analyze the signaling performance of ZP2P nodes and Gnutella nodes, with means of random graph theory and in