Abstract
The search targets in traditional P2P networks are often files or people, and the names of the files or people are the primary attribute for lookup to locate the target. A distinct feature of these applications is that the name attribute do not change with time. However in applications such as P2P computing and streaming that require quality resources, the search targets may be CPU cycles, memory space, and network bandwidth. The status of these targets may change when they are used and their search attributes may differ with time. Traditional P2P systems which implement a distributed directory may not serve these applications efficiently, due to the frequent updates and the possibility of false positive answers. Fortunately, in these applications peers usually supply only one set of resources and can thus be characterized by one set of attributes. In this thesis, we propose Attribute-Based Overlay Network (AON) for searching dynamic resources. The idea is to interconnect the peers according to their attributes instead of some hash keys. Nodes with similar attributes will thus be neighbors in the overlay. Shortcuts are created according to the principle of small world for routing efficiency. AON can easily handle dynamic changing resources and answers queries requesting a given number of similar nodes. The simulation experiments show that AON can perform as well as CAN in searching efficiency. When facing churns, AON presents higher stability.