Abstract : pToday’s internet exploits the P2P network for its unique and special characteristics such as resource sharing, query routing, dynamic topology construction, self-healing in communications and easy and efficient network setup. Moreover, P2P network has undergone many challenges which enable malicious nodes to launch denial of service attacks, allows the adversary peer nodes to deny the query request and even not utilizing its energy for query routing process in the network. These challenges resultant in performance degradation and reduce the query success ratio. In this paper, the authors elaborate the robust trust-based peer communication model that utilizes the scalable topology by building an overlay network with trusted neighbor peers. By having the trustworthiness among the neighbor peer nodes, the privacy, security protection in query searching and success ratio has been increased simultaneously. The main contribution of this paper is to compute Trust-Matrix-Value (TMV) for each peer node, based on the parameters such as query response (QR), resource sharing (RS), information quality (QI) and success ratio (SR). The peer nodes with higher values are considered for further query forwarding and others traffic has been blocked. A comprehensive analysis has been performed and their simulation results proved that the proposed scheme achieves efficient searching with minimal delay, discards by penalizing the malicious peer nodes from the topology, and maximizes the query success ratio in P2P networks. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018./p
