Over the recent years peer-to-peer (p2p) systems have become increasingly popular. As of today most of the internet IP traffic is already transmitted in this format and still it is said to double in volume till 2014. Most p2p systems, however, are not pure serverless solutions, nor is the searching in those networks highly efficient, usually achieved by simple flooding. In order to confront with the growing traffic we must consider more elaborate search mechanisms and far less centralized environments. An effective proposal to this problem is to solve it in the domain of ant colony optimization metaheuristics. In this paper we present an overview of ACO algorithms that offer the best potential in this field, under the strict requirements and limitations of a pure p2p network. We design several experiments to serve as an evaluation platform for the mentioned algorithms to conclude the features of a high quality approach. Finally, we consider two hybrid extensions to the classical algorithms, in order to examine their contribution to the overall quality robustness. 
On the performance of ACO-based methods in p2p resource discovery