A class of structured P2P systems supporting browsing

Browsing is a way of finding documents in a large amount of data which is complementary to querying and which is particularly suitable for multimedia documents. Locating particular documents in a very large collection of multimedia documents such as the ones available in peer to peer networks is a difficult task. However, current peer to peer systems do not allow to do this by browsing. In this report, we show how one can build a peer to peer system supporting a kind of browsing. In our proposal, one must extend an existing distributed hash table system with a few features : handling partial hash-keys and providing appropriate routing mechanisms for these hash-keys. We give such an algorithm for the particular case of the Tapestry distributed hash table. This is a work in progress as no proper validation has been done yet.Comment: 14 page