Using the small-world model to improve Freenet performance

Efficient data retrieval in an unstructured peer-to-peer system like Freenet is a challenging problem. In this paper, we study the impact of workload on the performance of Freenet. We find that there is a steep reduction in the hit ratio of document requests with increasing load in Freenet. We show that a slight modification of Freenet's routing table cache replacement scheme (from LRU to a replacement scheme that enforces clustering in the key space) can significantly improve performance. Our modification is based on intuition from the small-world models and theoretical results by Kleinberg; our replacement scheme forces the routing tables to resemble neighbor relationships in a small-world acquaintance graph--clustering with light randomness. Our simulations show that this new scheme improves the request hit ratio dramatically while keeping the small average hops per successful request comparable to LRU. A simple, highly idealized model of Freenet under clustering with light randomness proves that the expected message delivery time in Freenet is O(log n) if the routing tables satisfy the small-world model and have the size θ(log2n).