Explore the "Small World Phenomena" in Pure P2P Information Sharing Systems

Pure Peer-to-peer architecture is becoming an important model for information sharing among dynamic groups of users with its low cost of entry and its natural model for resource scaling with the community size. Recent studies on several pure P2P information-sharing systems have posed new questions and challenges in this area. By identifying two key factors in such an environment, we propose a new heuristic search algorithm to make better use of the “small world phenomena” among the peers in order to find the “six degrees of separation” more efficiently. We show by experiment that our heuristic algorithm out-performs the traditional BFS algorithm with an over 10% performance-increase when querying related information, and a 20% increase when a shift of interest takes place. The heuristic algorithm also has a better control over the number of node-to-visit using our NodeCount feature than the existing TTL mechanism.