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.