IP-based Clustering for Peer-to-Peer Overlays

The efficiency of overlay networks built on top of the IP network is often threatened by the mismatch between the topologies of the overlay and the underlying IP network, resulting in unnecessary traffic and increased latencies. Substantial improvement can be achieved by optimizing the logical links between overlay nodes to better match the IP network topology. In this paper, we propose a new method for selfoptimization of a DHT-based peer-to-peer overlay. Our method has no need for active measurement of inter-node latencies, thus minimizing network traffic costs of node insertion and topology maintenance. We verify our method by means of analysis of large data sets of latency measurements between arbitrary nodes on the Internet, proving correlation among common IP prefix length of communicating nodes and latency.