Proactive Gossip-Based Management of Semantic Overlay Networks

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.