Mapping Social Networks into P2P Directory Service

This paper presents our approach to use social network information in P2P networks in order to efficiently retrieve relevant information by exploiting existing trust relations of the social network links. The novelty of our work is to demonstrate that only a subset of the whole social network is adequate to build an efficient and reliable service. We use our P2P network, which is an adaptation of virtual ring routing mechanisms originally proposed for ad-hoc networks, to deploy a directory service facilitating search for friends - a common functionality required in online social networks as well. We expect our mechanism can be used in facilitating the deployment of peer-to-peer online social networks. Small scale experiment results, using both artificial as well as real social network graphs, show that with even only small subset of nodes from the whole social network, the approach achieves a high level of query success.