Emerging Social Networks in Peer-to-Peer Systems

The objective of this project is to simulate a Peer-to-Peer type of environment with the JADE multi-agent system platform to investigate the use of social networks to optimize the speed of search and to improve quality of service in the Peer-to-Peer environment. Our project uses the Gnutella protocol as a starting point. The Gnutella protocol broadcasts messages for searching files. This message passing generates much traffic in the network. This degrades the quality of service. We propose a model where each peer has a “friends list”, for each category of interest. Once peers generate their “friends list”, they use these lists for searching files in the network. The model has been implemented and some initial experiments have been performed.