Currently filesharing networks based on the Gnutella technology are pretty slow, mainly based because the network need a lot of traffic only to keep it up. Imagine that if you search for a certain file, your search needs to travel to thousands of clients on the network to be effective, and imagine the kind of traffic this will cause, because it hops from client to client.
A team from Princeton University in New Jersey, the University of California in Berkley and the networking companies AT&T and Cisco have developed a system of "random walkers" to speed up the process, and make peer to peer networks more efficient:
A team from Princeton University in New Jersey, the University of California in Berkley and the networking companies AT&T and Cisco have developed a system of "random walkers" to speed up the process, according to New Scientist magazine. |
Rather than flooding many messages across a network, the system has discovered that it is better to allow a few messages to randomly "walk" between individual machines.
The research indicated that the optimum number of "walkers" sent out to find a file is between 16 and 64.
The group hopes its research can be used to distribute massive amounts of computing power for scientific applications in the form of "distributed supercomputers".
But it could also boost internet music and video file sharing by making the underlying P2P networks larger and more robust.
Source: Vnunet.com
