Dynamic Search Algorithm in Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks

Designing efficient search algorithms is a key challenge in unstructured peer-to-peer networks. Flooding and Random Walk (RW) are two typical search algorithms. Flooding searches aggressively and covers the most nodes. However, it generates a large amount of query messages and, thus, does not scale. On the contrary, RW searches conservatively. It only generates a fixed amount of query messages at each hop but would take longer search time. The authors propose the Dynamic Search (DS) algorithm, which is a generalization of flooding and RW.