Abstract
As the applications over Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks become more popular, lots of research has focused on the mechanisms of searching, aggregating and routing in P2P networks. To support these functions, estimating network size is vital for global information. Unlike centralized systems, P2P networks are dynamic and scalable; besides, there is no server to maintain the information in P2P networks. These properties make the information about network size hard to obtain. In recent years, some research has addressed the mechanisms for getting the estimated size of unstructured P2P networks. However, a one-shot estimation is not practical when the network size is dynamic. As a result, we first provide a comprehensive comparison among three related methods in three popular overlay graphs and then propose two modifications based on one of the methods. With our improvements, this modified method can function well in the three overlay graphs and continuously monitor network size with precisely latency control. We present the experimental results to show our improvement over the one-shot estimation and the outcomes of latency control of continuous estimation in dynamic networks.