Performance Improvement of Hint-Based Locating & Routing Mechanism in P2P File-Sharing Systems

Hint-based Locating & Routing Mechanism (HBLR) derives from the locating & routing mechanism in Freenet. HBLR uses file location hint to enhance the performance of file searching and downloading. In comparison with its ancestor, HBLR saves storage space and reduces file request latency. However, because of the inherent fallibility of hint, employing location hint naively for file locating in P2P file-sharing system will lead to under-expectant performance. In this paper, hint’s uncertainty and related bad results are analyzed. According to the causation, pertinent countermeasures including credible hint, master-copy transfer, and file existence pre-detection are proposed. Simulation shows the performance of HBLR is improved by adopting the proposed policies.