[p2p-hackers] Paradigma Question: DHT's or Small World?

[Alexander Löser]

Hey all,
structured overlay networks  based on DHT's, such as Pastry and  Chord
among others, have been investigated in the past to construct scalable
and performance orientated peer-to-peer networks.  However, unstructured
networks, such as Gnutella or Kazaa,  are still widely used among the
file sharing community. Recently researchers proposed extensions to
unstructured networks  networks based on the small world idea: peers
dynamically create shortcuts to other peers based on their interests.
Over a while peers with the same interests became direct neighbors
through its shortcuts and build interest based clusters.   Hence peers
no longer flood messages but partly route it's queries via a interested
based/semantic  overlay.  Examples are described in [1] [2] among
others.

Comparing small world and DHT  approaches is a difficult task, since
simulations usually differ in scenarios, data sets or simulation
methodology.    I'm interested in scenarios and arguments PRO small
world overlays for unstructured networks. Does anybody now actual
theoretic or practical work that compares both approaches in different
scenarios (high churn, no super peers, key word based search, meta data
based search)?  Which scenarios or arguments support small world
approaches for unstructured networks?

Alex




[1] Gia - Making Gnutella like P2P Systems Scalable
http://berkeley.intel-research.net/sylvia/1103-chawathe.pdf
http://seattle.intel-research.net/people/yatin/publications/talks/sigcomm2003-gia.ppt

[2]  Efficient Content Location Using Interest Based Locality in
Peer-to-Peer Systems
http://www.ieee-infocom.org/2003/papers/53_01.PDF
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  Alexander Löser
  Technische Universitaet Berlin
  hp: http://cis.cs.tu-berlin.de/~aloeser/
  office: +49- 30-314-25551
  fax   : +49- 30-314-21601
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