Analysis of the match probabilities for the iTrust information network with message forwarding

The iTrust system is a completely distributed and decentralized information publication, search and retrieval system, that is designed to defend against censorship of information in the Internet. In this paper, we investigate the iTrust system with message forwarding, which spreads the responsibility of message distribution more widely across the nodes in the network. We present an analysis of the match probabilities of the iTrust system with message forwarding, in terms of the forwarding fanout, the number of levels of forwarding, and the forwarding probability. We show that, with a forwarding probability of 1.0, relatively small values of the forwarding fanout and the number of levels of forwarding suffice to achieve a high match probability and a reasonable message cost.