1.

INTRODUCTION
CONTEXT of this study. To search for a node with known property is a
basic recurrent problem arising in many distributed applications. For
example, in routing protocols for mobile wireless networks, and, the
searched node is identified by its IP address, while in peer-to-peer (P2P)
architectures by a key, associated to the object the node stores. Searching
is also a central functionality in a service-oriented architecture (SOA),
with their Shift toward wireless communication support, distributed
systems are becoming more dynamic, and the search problem is
consequently becoming even more challenging. This paper focuses on the
search problem in the context of mobile wireless networks, i.e.,
autonomous self-organizing networks composed of a set of wireless
devices. Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to face a search
problem: structured and unstructured. The former exploits a logical
structure for guiding searches, e.g., routing tables stored at nodes,
Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs), or centralized/distributed directories,
while the latter does not leverage any logical organization in the
Search space. To maintain the structure used to support a search may
become challenging in mobile networks since the mobility of nodes
makes the topology of the network also variable. For this reason, the
unstructured approach is regarded as an attractive alternative, as more
deeply discussed, for example, in. An unstructured search has to
potentially explore the
Whole network; as such, it is generally carried out by flooding.
Alternatively, random walks can be used. Compared to flooding, a

random walk search has a more fine-grained control of the search space, a
higher adaptiveness
to termination conditions, and can naturally cope with failures or
voluntary disconnections of nodes. Examples of concrete exploitations of
random walks in wireless networks are found in the context of routing
protocols for MANET, Hint-Based routing , and most recently, in P2P
over MANET, e.g., ROAN. Graph theoretical studies on random walks
that are relevant for wireless networks have also recently appeared in the
literature, biased random walks are random walks in which nodes have
statistical preference to forward the walker toward the target. The clear
advantage of a biased random walk is that it reduces the excepted number
of steps before the target is reached, called the hitting time,
significatively. However, the bias level achievable in a real setting is
limited, while the implementation of any biasing mechanism comes at
some additional cost. Thus, to understand the effect of bias on the hitting
time is an important preliminary step for
Deciding the practical benefit of a random walk-based search algorithm.
The effect of bias on the hitting time when the random walk is executed
over a wireless network is the subject of this paper.