Improved search latency in peer to peer networks with content links

Sharing of content on the internet has become more and more prevalent over the years. As the number of internet users grows exponentially, issues of scale related to content distribution and discovery have become more important. Peer to Peer networks have been proposed as an alternate way to traditional client server models to distribute and search content. While peer to peer networks are better than the client server models for load balancing, they generate a large amount of network traffic either during the content publish phase or during the content search phase or both. In this paper we investigate the power of location aware content groups formed from content links in a distributed manner using content metadata to improve the efficiency and accuracy of content search with the conflicting goal of keeping the network traffic to a minimum. We show by way of simulation the improvement in performance of content search over traditional approaches as in Gnutella.