Information Search in Large Scale Peer to Peer Systems

Peer to peer systems are a particular type of distributed systems that have no centralized entities. The system builds on multiple hosts that are autonomous (and symmetric) in relation to each other. Without any central entity, the system has no single point of failure and will continue to work despite the failure of any of its hosts. The lack of a central entity also implies that the system must adapt to host failures autonomously in order to maintain availability. The ability to withstand host failures without requiring external intervention and in maintaining availability during this period is an interesting property of peer to peer systems. With the promise of high scalability and availability, the quantity of shared information within such large system would be huge. However, no system offered an efficient way to search the information shared between hosts. This book presents algorithms and systems that can search for information efficiently within a very large number of hosts through the use of very large distributed index structures.