Distributed message routing in unstructured P2P network overlays

Abstract

The paper presents an alternative message routing approach in unstructured peer-to-peer overlay networks. Unstructured peer-to-peer systems are loosely coupled, highly autonomous systems without hierarchy. Usually, flooding-based routing mechanisms are used for sending messages through the application layer overlay. Due to the limited scalability and high network load experiences, the paper suggests an improvement to reduce the traffic and overall performance: a peer remembers recently forwarded answers, so that he may route the next query messages with the same contents only to the relevant neighbor, not to all of them. Preliminary network simulations have shown promising results.