Abstract

Napster pioneered the idea of peer-to-peer file sharing, and supported it with a centralized file search facility. Subsequent P2P systems like Gnutella adopted decentralized search algorithms. However, Gnutella's notoriously poor scaling led some to propose distributed hash table solutions to the wide-area file search problem. Contrary to that trend, we advocate retaining Gnutella's simplicity while proposing new mechanisms that greatly improve its scalability. Building upon prior research [1, 12, 22], we propose several modifications to Gnutella's design that dynamically adapt the overlay topology and the search algorithms in order to accommodate the natural heterogeneity present in most peer-to-peer systems. We test our design through simulations and the results show three to five orders of magnitude improvement in total system capacity. We also report on a prototype implementation and its deployment on a testbed.