InfoShare : Information sharing system with a mechanism of selectively cooperative retrieval on hybrid P2P networks

We propose an information sharing system (called InfoShare) which is a set of multiple hybrid peer-to-peer (P2P) networks logically connected to a cooperative server. The design goal of the system is to form a multipurpose distributed database to share various kinds of information distributed on the campus and to access to the Internet website. Each of peers in the campus submits metadata of its own files to a meta-server (called information server) that forms a local database. As each local database may classify those information into different categories, the cooperative server plays an important role to succeed in reconciling paradox among them. When a certain peer retrieves information from the system, the information servers that have metadata included in the query cooperatively search target files. Consequently the peer gets the target file directly from another peer or a website. InfoShare also has a cache mechanism for well-referred files as a countermeasure taken to avoid peer’s leaving. Our experimental results show that InfoShare has an excellent retrieval response time and can be effectively adaptable to many applications of campus information sharing.