Sharif Digital Repository

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are beginning to form the infrastructure of future applications. Heavy network traffic limits the scalability of P2P networks. Indexing is a method to reduce this traffic. But indexes tend to become large with the growth of the network. Also, limiting the size of these indexes causes loss of indexing information. In this paper we introduce a novel ontology based index (OI) which limits the size of the indexes without sacrificing indexing information. We show that the method can be employed by many P2P networks. The OI sits on top of routing and maintenance modules of a P2P network and enhances it. The OI prunes branches of search trees which have no chance to...