Efficient Queries in Peer-to-Peer Systems Prasanna Ganesan and Hector Garcia-Molina   View Paper (PDF)   Return to March 2005, In-Network Query Processing, Volume 28, Number 1 Abstract A peer-to-peer (P2P) system consists of a large, dynamic set of machines, distributed over a wide-area network, collaboratively storing and managing data in a fully decentralized fashion. The scale, dynamism and network-wide distribution of P2P systems provide new twists to age-old data management problems, requiring the development of novel techniques for data storage and retrieval. In this article, we describe solutions developed by the Stanford P2P group for enabling efficient queries in P2P systems. We focus particularly on how to optimize data storage to support various kinds of queries, including range queries, multi-dimensional queries and similarity search. ©2006 Association for Computing Machinery