Patent ID: 7849139

Claim:
A method of searching information located within a plurality of peer-devices wherein said plurality of peer-devices store information in the form of reports and communicate by a short-range wireless network, comprising the steps of: (a) initiating a multihop search, represented by a query, by an originator in said plurality of peer-devices wherein said originator does not need to know the locations of searched reports; (b) transmitting said query by said originator to at least one neighbor of said originator, wherein a neighbor is an additional peer-device in said plurality of peer-devices that is within transmission range of a transmitter; (c) selecting queries and reports from local storage by set X of peer-devices from said plurality of peer-devices that receive queries or reports, and transmitting selected queries and reports to neighbors of said set X; (d) repeating step 1 (c) recursively; and (e) ranking reports by a peer-device P 1 , wherein the rank of a report R 1 is a function of the demand for R 1 which is the number of peer-devices in said short-range wireless network requesting R 1 or the total degree to which R 1 matches the requests of said peer-devices, or of the size of R 1 , or of the reliability of R 1 , or of the supply of R 1 in said short-range wireless network wherein said supply is the fraction of peer-devices having R 1 ; wherein the rank of said report R 1 computed by said peer-device P 1 at time t, denoted rank(R 1 , t), is proportional to demand(R 1 ,t), or proportional to (1-supply(R 1 ,t)), or proportional to reliability(R 1 , t) where reliability(R 1 ,t) is a function that returns the reliability of R 1 at time t, or inversely proportional to size (R 1 ).