Shrack: Description and Performance Evaluation of a Peer-to-Peer System for Document Sharing and Tracking using Pull-Only Information Dissemination

Shrack is a peer-to-peer framework for document sharing and tracking. Shrack peers provide support to researchers in forming direct collaboration in autonomous sharing and keeping track of newly published documents based on their interests. We propose a pull-only information dissemination protocol for peers to distribute information about new documents among peers with similar interests. Each peer can use the disseminated information to build a local view of semantic overlay of peer interests in the network. Each peer can later use the semantic overlay to find new contact information about other peers with a particular interests, as well as search for documents archived by other peers. After presenting an overview architecture of the system and the dissemination protocol, we present the evaluation results of the system performance, based on a simulated environment. The results indicate that the Shrack protocol is scalable and reliable as the network size increases.