Peer-to-Peer networks attracted a significant amount of interest because of their capacity for resource sharing and content distribution. Content distribution applications allow personal computers to function in a coordinated manner as a distributed storage medium by contributing, searching, and obtaining digital content. Searching in unstructured P2P networks is an important problem, which has received considerable research attention. Acceptable searching techniques must provide large coverage rate, low traffic load, and optimum latency. This paper reviews flooding-based search techniques in unstructured P2P networks. It then analytically compares their coverage rate, and traffic overloads. Our simulation experiments have validated analytical results.

Peer-to-peer systems are important Internet applications. A major portion of Internet traffic belongs to such applications. Flooding search is a basic search scheme for unstructured peerto-peer networks, where a node must send a query message to all its neighbors when seeking a file (in a file sharing situation). Flooding has no knowledge about network topology and files distribution, thus it offers an attractive method for file discovery in dynamic and evolving networks. Although pure flooding can achieve high coverage but it produces exponentially redundant messages in each hop. Consequently, the growth of redundant messages limits system scalability and causes unnecessary traffic in networks. Besides, flooding has no opportunity to get an advantage of node diversity of participating in unstructured P2P networks. To improve this searching scheme and reduce redundant messages, this paper proposes a novel algorithm named HybridFlood. This algorithm is divided into two steps. The first step follows the flooding with a limited number of hops. In the second step, nosey nodes are selected in each searching horizon. The nosey nodes are nodes which have the most links to other nodes. These nodes maintain the data index of all client nodes. We provided analytical studies for flooding and HybridFlood. The analytical results provided the best threshold point of hop for optimum coverage growth rate and redundant messages in flooding. It also proved in HybridFlood broadcasting messages are cut down at least an order of magnitude. Thus, the proposed algorithm extends the search efficiency by reducing redundant messages in each hop. The simulation experiments validated analytical results.

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