Proactive gossip‐based management of semantic overlay networks
Spyros Voulgaris, Maarten R. van Steen, Konrad Iwanicki · Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience · 2007
Abstract Much research on content‐based P2P searching for file‐sharing applications has focused on exploiting semantic relations between peers to facilitate searching. Current methods suggest reactive ways to manage semantic relations: they rely on the usage of the underlying search mechanism, and infer semantic relationships based on the queries placed and the corresponding replies received. In this paper we follow a different approach, proposing a proactive method to build a semantic overlay. Our method is based on an epidemic protocol that clusters peers with similar content. Peer clustering is done in a completely implicit way, that is, without requiring the user to specify preferences or to characterize the content of files being shared. In our approach, each node maintains a small list of semantically optimal peers. Our simulation studies show that such a list is highly effective when searching files. The construction of this list through gossiping is efficient and robust, even in the presence of changes in the network. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.