Efficient Topology-Aware Overlay Network

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking has become a household word in the past few years, being marketed as a work-around for server scalability problems and ``wonder drug'' to achieve resilience. Current widely-used P2P networks rely on central directory servers or massive message flooding, clearly not scalable solutions. Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) are expected to eliminate flooding and central servers, but can require many long-haul message deliveries. We introduce Mithos, an content-addressable overlay network that only uses minimal routing information and is directly suitable as an underlay network for P2P systems, both using traditional and DHT addressing. Unlike other schemes, it also efficiently provides locality-aware connectivity, thereby ensuring that a message reaches its destination with minimal overhead. Mithos provides for highly efficient forwarding, making it suitable for use in high-throughput applications. Paired with its ability to have addresses directly mapped into a subspace of the IPv6 address space, it provides a potential candidate for native deployment. Additionally, Mithos can be used to support third-party triangulation to quickly select a close-by replica of data or services.

Documents

• PDF (6 pages, 315 kBytes)
• The slides are available in OpenOffice original and PowerPoint export
• An in-depth description with more analysis is also available.
• Related documents (CiteSeer/ResearchIndex)
• Part of the P2P project, related to Forwarding

BibTeX entry

@InProceedings{waldvogel02efficient,
  Author =       {Marcel Waldvogel and Roberto Rinaldi},
  Title =        {Efficient Topology-Aware Overlay Network},
  BookTitle =    {Proceedings of HotNets-I},
  Address =      {Princeton, NJ, USA},
  Year =         2002,
  Month =        oct,
}

@Article{waldvogel03efficient,
  Author =       {Marcel Waldvogel and Roberto Rinaldi},
  Title =        {Efficient Topology-Aware Overlay Network},
  Journal =	 {ACM Computer Communication Review},
  Year =         2003,
  Month =        jan,
  Volume =       33,
  Number =       1,
  Pages =        {101-106},
  Comment =      {Special Issue for HotNets-I}
}