Plexus: Routing and Indexing

Abstract

A scalable and distributed indexing mechanism is essential for any P2P web hosting solution. We also need to search indexed information in a bandwidth efficient manner. Search and indexing is essential for a number of reasons. First, we need to maintain information about each peer in the system, e.g., their name and IP address binding, availability information, last seen time etc. Second, we need to keep track of the Web contents hosted in different peers. Third, we need to keep track of the relative importance or popularity of the available contents for ranking them in the search results. We have previously developed a distributed search technique named Plexus [1] that supports bandwidth efficient search and approximate matching. Plexus has been intensively used for pWeb deployment. In this section, we present the basic protocols in Plexus. We also outline a few enhancements to the basic Plexus protocol to support the above mentioned requirements.