Acquaintance-based protocol for detecting multimedia objects in peer-to-peer overlay networks

Multimedia objects are distributed on peer computers (peers) in peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks. An application has to find target peers which can support enough quality of service (QoS) of multimedia objects. We discuss types of acquaintance relations of peers with respect to what objects each peer holds, can manipulate, and can grant access rights. We discuss a new type of flooding algorithm to find target peers based on charge and acquaintance concepts so that areas in networks where target peers are expected to exist are more deeply searched. We evaluate the charge-based flooding algorithm compared with a TTL-based flooding algorithm in terms of the number of messages transmitted in networks.