A Survey of Search Algorithms for Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Applications in Mobile Computing Infrastructure

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Networking have a lot of practical applicability’s over the years. File storage and resource sharing are few key areas among the others where such peered network architecture is widely successful. The common building block for P2P networking is to store or locate an identifiable resource, for which there are basically 3 approaches namely (1) local storage/broadcast search (2) global storage/local search (3) distributed storage/distributed search. With the development of mobile hardware and wireless technology, it further became feasible to use mobile devices in these P2P networks. This computing architecture is widely used in Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) for building content sharing applications. Search algorithm and file transfer schemes are the basic components of such content sharing systems. In this article, we provide a brief overview of the resource discovery approaches for peer-to-peer file sharing applications over MANET. We analyze and classify the search techniques into 4 broad schemes, mainly the flooding-based schemes, Distributed Hash Table (DHT) based schemes, advertisement-based schemes, and social network-based schemes. The pros and cons of each technique is summarized. Further, a one-to-one comparison is done across the classes for quick interpretation. We also outline the various issues, and complications that should be taken into consideration while designing any resource discovery algorithm. Further, we briefly discuss the security threats, and present state-of-the-art countermeasures for it. Also, we highlight some important guidelines that need to be focused while designing efficient file sharing applications and services in Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) enabled networks. Comprehensive and in-depth assessments of the related approaches are presented providing clear insights for the future research directions.