Department of Computer Science Colloquium
Monday April 15th, 2002 at 4:15pm 
*5130 Upson Hall

 Exploiting Network Proximity in Peer-to-Peer Overlay Networks

Peter Druschel

Rice University

Peer-to-peer (p2p) overlay networks like CAN, Chord, Pastry and Tapestry offer a novel platform for a variety of scalable and decentralized distributed applications. These systems provide efficient and fault-tolerant routing, object location and load balancing within a self-organizing overlay network, and have been used to support applications as diverse as network storage and end-system multicast. One important aspect of these systems is how they exploit network proximity in the underlying Internet. Without considering network proximity, a simple query message in these systems may travel across several continents. Proximity routing is thus critical for good application performance and low network utilization. In this talk, I'll take a detailed look at the network proximity properties of several p2p overlay networks. Results obtained via analysis and via simulation on two large-scale Internet topology models indicate that it is possible to efficiently exploit network proximity in self-organizing p2p substrates.