A congestion-aware search protocol for heterogeneous peer-to-peer networks

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing is the hottest, fastest growing application on the Internet. When designing Gnutella-like applications, the most important consideration is the scalability problem, because P2P systems typically support millions of users online concurrently. Gnutella suffers from poor scaling due to its flooding-based search, resulting in excessive amounts of repeated query messages. Therefore, a good search protocol plays an important role in a system’s scalability. However, congestion, due to large query loads from users, definitely impacts on the performance of search protocols, and this consideration has received little attention from the research community. In this paper, we propose a congestion-aware search protocol for unstructured P2P networks. Our protocol consists of three parts—Congestion-Aware Forwarding, Random Early Stop and Emergency Signaling. The aim of our protocol is to integrate congestion control and object discovery functionality so that the search protocol can achieve good performance under congested networks and flash crowds. We perform extensive simulations to study our proposed protocol. The results show that our protocol can significantly reduce the hit delay while maintaining the high hit rate and also the congestion problems such as query loss and the peer overloading problem can be effectively alleviated.