Efa: An Efficient Content Routing Algorithm in Large Peer-to-Peer Overlay Networks

An important issue for peer-to-peer application is to locate content within the network. There are many existing solutions to this problem, however, each of them addresses different aspects and each has its deficiencies. In this paper, we focus on the unstructured peer-to-peer scenario and present a constrained flooding routing algorithm, Efa, which overcomes some of the deficiencies of those existing strategies. Efa performs application level broadcasting in a potentially very large peer-to-peer network overlaid on the Internet. Efa is completely decentralized and self-organized. It is a more scalable alternative to flooding, which is commonly used in unstructured peer-to-peer systems. Utilizing just a small amount of topology info, Efa is almost as simple as flooding, but it is much more efficient and scalable.