Topology-Aware Overlay Construction in Dynamic Networks

Lately, peer-to-peer overlay networks and their ability to reflect the underlying network topology have been a focus in research. The main objective has been to reduce routing path lengths, stretched by the overlay routing process. In most solutions developed, a kind of fixed infrastructure in the form of so called landmarks or excessive message exchange are necessary to guarantee good overlay locality properties. Some solutions also deliberately give up even overlay ID distribution when constructing an overlay network with locality information. This paper presents a topology-aware overlay network based on Pastry which does not rely on any fixed set of infrastructure nodes. Additionally, the approach presented here tries to construct the overlay with only little communication overhead and still tries to distribute overlay IDs as evenly as possible. Two bootstrap strategies were developed and analyzed, both explicitly designed to work in dynamic networks.