An enhanced Gnutella P2P protocol: a search perspective

Although Gnutella is the most popular peer-to-peer protocol for file sharing, drawbacks are often found in searching and locating files. They include that (1) a limited number of hosts being searched leads to a limited number of hits; (2) the search result is not accurate due to the search by filename; and (3) an inefficient use of computer resource - spending too much resource on handling other peers' queries. In order to rectify these drawbacks, this paper proposes N-phase search and passive search mechanisms. Compared with the traditional search mechanism, N-phase search increases the number of received query hits by 55.41% and increases the host coverage by 41.23%. For the passive search, the average search time is reduced by 15.33%.