Real-time Information Querying over Peer-to-Peer Networks using Timestamps

Abstract

Most P2P networks are used for file-sharing applications. These forms of applications mainly rely on keyword searching to locate file resources on the peers. Whilst this querying is suitable for many data-intensive applications, it is not suitable for applications where data changes over short periods of time, also known as time-critical applications. We investigate the use of timestamps on a peer's knowledge about an application to create queries so that other peers may reply with more up-to-date information to keep the peer's knowledge up-to-date. We propose means to synchronise peers to provide them with a shared, independent clock so that they utilize timestamps. To show that a peer's knowledge about a time-critical application affects the performance of other peers, we carried out experiments to show information propagation over a P2P network and use various metrics to evaluate our approach.