Evolution of social models in peer-to-peer networking: towards self-organising networks

In social networks, people can directly contact some acquaintances that potentially have knowledge about the resources they are looking for. Similarly to social networks, where people are connected by their social relationships, two autonomous peer nodes can be connected in unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) networks if users in those nodes are interested in each other's data. The similarity between P2P networks and social networks, where peer nodes can be considered as people and connections can be considered as relationships, makes it possible to use social models to improve the performance of resource discovery in P2P networks. In this paper, evolution of social models in P2P networking is systematically investigated with a focus on utilising self-organisation to improve the performance of resource discovery in large-scale P2P networks.