Despite their growing popularity, the behavior of super-peernetworks is not well understood. For example, what are the potential drawbacks of super-peer networks? How can super-peers be made more reliable? How many clients should a superpeer take on to maximize efficiency? In this paper we examinesuper-peer networks in detail, gaining an understanding of their fundamental characteristics and performance tradeoffs. We alsopresent practical guidelines and a general procedure for the design of an efficient super-peer network.

Peer-to-peer systems have emerged as a popular way to share huge volumes of data. The usability of these systems depends on effective techniques to find and retrieve data; however, current techniques used in existing P2P systems are often very inefficient. In this paper, we present three techniques for efficient search in P2P systems. We present the design of these techniques, and then evaluate them using a combination of experiments over Gnutella, the largest open P2P system in operation, and analysis. We show that while our techniques maintain the same quality of results as currently used techniques, our techniques use up to 5 times fewer resources. In addition, we designed our techniques to be simple in design and implementation, so that they can be easily incorporated into existing systems for immediate impact. Keywords: Peer-to-peer, distributed data, search, performance modeling, evaluation Technical Area(s): Databases, performance modeling and evaluation 1