Dynamic walks for searching streaming media in peer-to-peer networks

With the advance of network technologies, availability and popularity of streaming media contents over the P2P (Peer-to-Peer) Networks have grown rapidly in recent years. However, how to efficiently search a requested steaming media among P2P peers is still a problem which causes a serious user delay and limited hit ratio. This paper presents an efficient search method for streaming media in P2P, which reduces user response delays and exchange overhead simultaneously. Based on an analytical formulation of both streaming media and P2P peers' characteristics, we derive a search algorithm which solves the next two problems quantitatively. (1) How to decide the number of walkers (queries) at each step of search? (2) How to decide the length of walkers (queries) at each step of search? Simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm efficiently resolves the above problems and provides much better performance than conventional methods.