A quorum-based protocol for searching objects in peer-to-peer networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) system is an overlay network of peer computers without centralized servers, and many applications have been developed for such networks such as file sharing systems. Because a set of peers dynamically changes, design and verification of efficient protocols is a challenging task. In this paper, we consider an object searching problem under a resource model such that there are some replicas in a system and the lower bound of the ratio /spl rho/=n'/n is known in advance, where n' is a lower bound of the number of peers that hold original or replica for any object type and n is the total number of peers. In addition, we consider object searching with probabilistic success, i.e., for each object search, object must be found with at least probability 0