An Extension and Cooperation Mechanism for Heterogeneous Overlay Networks

In real-world peer-to-peer applications, the scalability of data lookup is heavily affected by network artifacts. A common solution to improve scalability, robustness and security is to increase the local properties of nodes, by clustering them together. This paper presents a framework which allows for the development of distributed applications on top of interconnected overlay network. Here, message routing between overlays is accomplished by using co-located nodes, i.e. nodes belonging to more than one overlay network at the same time. These co-located nodes serve as distributed gateways, enabling the routing of requests across overlays, while keeping overlay maintenance operations local. The protocol has been evaluated via simulations and client deployment, showing that the ability, of reaching the totality of the overlays in a federated configuration can be preserved even with the simplest routing, proving the feasibility of federated overlay configurations.