On Constructing Internet-Scale P2P Information Retrieval Systems

We initiate a study on the effect of the network topology on the performance of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) information retrieval systems. The emerging P2P model has become a very powerful and attractive paradigm for developing Internet-scale systems for sharing resources, including files, or documents. We show that the performance of Information Retrieval algorithms can be significantly improved through the use of fully distributed topologically aware overlay network construction techniques. Our empirical results, using the Peerware middleware infrastructure, show that the approach we propose is both efficient and