A Survey of Search Algorithms for Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Applications
in Mobile Computing Infrastructure
Abstract
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Networking have a lot of practical applicability’s
over the years. File storage and resource sharing are few key areas
among the others where such peered network architecture is widely
successful. The common building block for P2P networking is to store or
locate an identifiable resource, for which there are basically 3
approaches namely (1) local storage/broadcast search (2) global
storage/local search (3) distributed storage/distributed search. With
the development of mobile hardware and wireless technology, it further
became feasible to use mobile devices in these P2P networks. This
computing architecture is widely used in Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET)
for building content sharing applications. Search algorithm and file
transfer schemes are the basic components of such content sharing
systems. In this article, we provide a brief overview of the resource
discovery approaches for peer-to-peer file sharing applications over
MANET. We analyze and classify the search techniques into 4 broad
schemes, mainly the flooding-based schemes, Distributed Hash Table (DHT)
based schemes, advertisement-based schemes, and social network-based
schemes. The pros and cons of each technique is summarized. Further, a
one-to-one comparison is done across the classes for quick
interpretation. We also outline the various issues, and complications
that should be taken into consideration while designing any resource
discovery algorithm. Further, we briefly discuss the security threats,
and present state-of-the-art countermeasures for it. Also, we highlight
some important guidelines that need to be focused while designing
efficient file sharing applications and services in Mobile Edge
Computing (MEC) enabled networks. Comprehensive and in-depth assessments
of the related approaches are presented providing clear insights for the
future research directions.