Selective Querying and Other Proposals for a Less Congested Gnutella Network

Abstract

Network congestion and look-up times are of prime concern in peer-to-peer networks and Gnutella is no exception to this problem. A number of proposals and suggestions have been made to improve the scalability and performance and to reduce the congestion in Gnutella networks. An improvement would be to query a subgroup of positive respondents of the PING message that is exchanged among peers prior to the QUERY message. We discuss possible ways in order to determine “profitable” peers which could result in a successful transfer of a requested file and further highlight issues which we think would reduce congestion in the network.