Non-replicable reusable resources discovery on scale-free peer-to-peer networks

Apart from files, P2P Networks can be used for sharing non-replicable and reusable (e.g. computational) resources. This paper explains why existing discovery mechanisms have low performance searching for those resources in random power-law degree distributions. While high-degree nodes become more popular, their resources are consumed, resulting into a power-law network topology with no more useful highly connected nodes. To address the problem, we introduce two blind search techniques, Scale-free FloodWalkers (SFFW) and Scale-free Walkers (SFW). The idea behind is that recent requestors have discovered recent providers and will soon release the recently acquired resources. We tested their performance through simulations and a number of experiments. They seem to have stable much higher success rate than flooding or k-walkers in scale-free networks while their cost in messages is one order of magnitude lower than flooding and equal to walkers, respectively.