Maximizing Remote Work in Flooding-based Peer-to-Peer Systems

Abstract

In peer-to-peer (P2P) systems where individual peers must cooperate to process each other's requests, a useful metric for evaluating the system is how many remote requests are serviced by each peer. In this paper we apply this remote work metric to flooding-based P2P search networks like Gnutella. We study how to maximize the remote work in the entire network by controlling the rate of search query generation at each node. In particular, we provide a simple procedure for finding the rate of query generation and prove its optimality. We also show that a simple prefer-high-TTL protocol in which each peer processes only search queries with the highest time-to-live (TTL) is optimal.