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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."
It occured to me a while ago that the ability of a peer-to-peer's network to provide a particular file would go up dramatically if less emphasis was put on "real-time" searching and instead in a sort-of subscription model -- the user would request a file, and the request could propagate overnight from client to client while the network itself decided the best/most reliable way to provide that particular file to that particular user... beyond privacy concerns and TTL spoofing on requests (which are probably both non-trivial problems with this idea) I'd certainly be willing to wait a couple days to get a particular file or set of files as long as I didn't have to "babysit" the client and as long as I could be assured that the file would be full and complete when it finally arrived.
~jeff