Chiang Mai Journal of Science

 Since the Internet is a large information for people all over the world, the search mechanism is a most important tool for the Internet users. Currently, many methods are proposed to determine the resource location, such as Flooding algorithm and Random walk. Unfortunately, the performance of these algorithms has some defects that cannot provide a full and correct list that the users’ require. Therefore, this paper proposes an effective search algorithm, called Patrol Packet (PTP) algorithm. PTP was developed under the implementation of the Information Search Protocol (ISP) where the search criteria can be determined. Thus, the results obtained from the PTP algorithm can satisfy users’ requirement with a quick response time. Since the PTP algorithm is obtained from a modification of the flooding algorithm, the number of distributed bytes over the communication channel is reduced when compared to the original algorithm. Consequently, congestion can be minimized. In addition, the performance testing of the PTP shows that this algorithm is suitable for distributed search where a large number of query messages spreads over the communication channel.