Search+ - an efficient peer-to-peer service discovery mechanism

This report looks at commonly used Peer-to-Peer (P2P) protocols and aims to identify strengths and weaknesses they may have in a military environment. We further describe some of the P2P based solutions for service discovery that exist today and argue that unstructured P2P protocols are theoretically more suitable for military needs as they are more robust and adaptable. Unstructured overlays have a tendency to give inaccurate search results and consume more bandwidth than structured alternatives. We implement and evaluate the search algorithm ASAP, which has shown promising results in simulations in terms of bandwidth and accuracy. Finally, we develop and implement Search+, a novel search algorithm for unstructured overlays that requires little bandwidth while providing close to 100% accuracy.