Searching behavior in peer-to-peer communities

The focus of this paper is the searching behavior in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communities and in that context, will discuss potential for enhancement of the P2P protocol using searching behavior. Due to excessive network traffic, network scalability is a major P2P problem. The purpose of this paper is to study searching behavior by using log files and subsequently, will propose solutions to reduce the amount of redundant searching activities. In the current research, log data containing over 5 million QUERY messages was collected over seven consecutive days using a Gnutella-based P2P program. The results of this study will be instrumental in providing ways to reduce existing problems with P2P network traffic.