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"Random Walkers" may speed P2P networks
sean23007 writes "New Scientist posts an article about an innovative new method of controlling P2P traffic to maximize speed over a very large network. The idea, thought up by researchers at Princeton, Berkeley, AT&T, and Cisco, involves sending random "walkers" around the network, looking for a particular file, which would theoretically yield much better search speed than such other networks as Gnutella. They claim this could result in a network very capable of facilitating a massive distributed supercomputer."
"...such file networks have particular difficulty locating uncommon documents, and that walkers are especially bad at it. This is because there are relatively few walkers, which might have to visit every node on the network to find the file.
"Langley also says the different connection speeds and processing power of the individual computers in the network may complicate the model: "Random walkers are going to end up at the well connected nodes."
My biggest pleasure from P2P is finding obscure or rare music. I could care less how many copies of N*Sync or Britney Spears there are. Give me rare studio cuts or bootleg recordings of the Grateful Dead any day. This strategy won't help searches for those types of items, but it sure will help the sheeple get their music.
If your on a marginally slow network (say upto a T1 (24 lines at 64 kbps)) and if you enable full node peering support on a Gnutella like network, you know why Random Walkers is needed. Cause the networks have become so huge, most of the bandwidth is taken by message searches. Even if you are not a node peer you would still be saturated by these.
The Random Walker idea isn't new, it was tried a few times before as well on the orginal Gnutella network when they first came out. But, I don't think Random Walkers would be the answer to this network, the bigger the network gets, even Random Walkers would saturate the bandwidth and all you'd have is these bots finding the optimal path to files.
Presently the network works much like how old routhers worked. Search packets are broadcasted to peering nodes which then broadcast the same packets off to their own neighbors. But the problem is that their own neigbors are sometimes the ones that sent the orignial packets. If this was to be done efficently (and how routers implement it), they need to create buffers to hold searches, once a search is recived a search would not be propagated to the other peers, it would be held for a given time period (say a few milliseconds), the node would then wait for the same search to appear from other neighoring nodes, it if does then it wouldnt send this search off down that node. This would cut down a lot of the wasted bandwidth and I am not sure why Gnutella ppl didn't model p2p after these routing methods.
Walkers in an intellient routing setup would be the most optimial way of doing p2p, hopefully this would loose up some of on the congestion on the current p2p networks and let people with less bandwidth access to the shared files with the least sacrifice on bandwitdh for searches.
Here's an idea...
Rather than dynamically searching for the file you want each and every time you type in the name, why not each user create a data-base on the files all the other users on the network are using?
Once you get on the network, it does a search and accesses other people's database, so your current file database is updated.
This would require much less bandwidth than searching dynamically every time you typed in a search term (though it would require a little bit of hard drive space), and it would allow search results to be produced very quickly, as you'd essentially be searching a file on your hard drive.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen