Scalability comparison of Peer-to-Peer similarity-search structures

Due to the increasing complexity of current digital data, similarity search has become a fundamental computational task in many applications. Unfortunately, its costs are still high and grow linearly on single server structures, which prevents them from efficient application on large data volumes. In this paper, we shortly describe four recent scalable distributed techniques for similarity search and study their performance in executing queries on three different datasets. Though all the methods employ parallelism to speed up query execution, different advantages for different objectives have been identified by experiments. The reported results would be helpful for choosing the best implementations for specific applications. They can also be used for designing new and better indexing structures in the future.