Section: Research Program

Peer-to-peer overlay networks

A standard distributed system today is related to thousands or even millions of computing entities scattered all over the world and dealing with a huge amount of data. This major shift in scalability requirements has lead to the emergence of novel computing paradigms. In particular, the peer-to-peer communication paradigm imposed itself as the prevalent model to cope with the requirements of large scale distributed systems. Peer-to-peer systems rely on a symmetric communication model where peers are potentially both clients and servers. They are fully decentralized, thus avoiding the bottleneck imposed by the presence of servers in traditional systems. They are highly resilient to peers arrivals and departures. Finally, individual peer behavior is based on a local knowledge of the system and yet the system converges toward global properties.

A peer-to-peer overlay network logically connects peers on top of IP. Two main classes of such overlays dominate, structured and unstructured. The differences relate to the choice of the neighbors in the overlay, and the presence of an underlying naming structure. Overlay networks represent the main approach to build large-scale distributed systems that we retained. An overlay network forms a logical structure connecting participating entities on top of the physical network, be it IP or a wireless network. Such an overlay might form a structured overlay network [47], [48], [49] following a specific topology or an unstructured network [45], [50] where participating entities are connected in a random or pseudo-random fashion. In between, lie weakly structured peer-to-peer overlays where nodes are linked depending on a proximity measure providing more flexibility than structured overlays and better performance than fully unstructured ones. Proximity-aware overlays connect participating entities so that they are connected to close neighbors according to a given proximity metric reflecting some degree of affinity (computation, interest, etc.) between peers. We extensively use this approach to provide algorithmic foundations of large-scale dynamic systems.