On Obtaining Global Information in a Peer-to-Peer Fully Distributed Environment

Networking solutions which do not depend on central services and where the components posses only partial information are robust and scalable but obtaining global information like e.g. the size of the network raises serious problems, especially in the case of very large systems. We consider a specific type of fully distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) environment with many interesting existing and potential applications. We suggest solutions for estimating network size and detecting partitioning, and we give estimations for the time complexity of global search in this environment. Our methods rely only on locally available (but continuously refreshed) partial information.