P2P (peer-to-peer) search is the process of finding relevant documents that meet user information needs in a document collection distributed among a group of peers in a P2P overlay. The main objectives of a good search system include minimum state maintained per peer, low bandwidth consumption, high accuracy, a large number of discovered documents, and robust and adaptive behavior in dynamic environments. Therefore, successful data management, query routing, and query evaluation as well as result aggregation methods need to be devised to aid in a successful P2P search.

The main foci of the Ph.D. thesis will be developing algorithms that perform efficient search over a distributed heterogeneous data collection, developing a search system that implements the proposed algorithms, and conducting a comprehensive performance analysis to test the developed system.

Committee
Dr. Sushil Prasad (chair)
Dr. Sham Navathe (co-chair)
Dr. WenZhan Song
Dr. Raj Sunderraman