A distributed bootstrapping protocol for overlay networks

Peer to peer overlay networks have become popular due to their inherent scalability and resilience properties that come naturally from their decentralized nature. Unfortunately, despite this decentralized approach there is still one important piece that remains centralized: a set of servers to provide identifiers to peers joining the system. This initial step is necessary as new peers need to obtain some contact points in order to establish links to them and join the overlay. This puts out of the protocol model a crucial mechanism as it introduces an external centralized entity to manage the process, leading to problems of scale and fault-tolerance. In scenarios where the churn rate is considerable, the cost of maintaining the list of known peers by the well-know servers may be unbearable. Furthermore, if the peer identifiers provided are not evenly distributed across the universe, this will inevitably cluster the overlay, making it more prone to partitions. In this paper we propose a fully decentralized protocol to obtain those set of initial contact peers using the already deployed infrastructure. By conducting an extensive experimental evaluation we show the effectiveness of the protocol and reason how the ideal number of contact peers may be provided in a fully decentralized fashion.

[1]  João Leitão,et al.  HyParView: A Membership Protocol for Reliable Gossip-Based Broadcast , 2007, 37th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'07).

[2]  Keith Marzullo,et al.  Directional Gossip: Gossip in a Wide Area Network , 1999, EDCC.

[3]  Tatsuhiro Tsuchiya,et al.  Constructing Overlay Networks with Low Link Costs and Short Paths , 2007, Sixth IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA 2007).

[4]  Eric Deliot,et al.  CLON: Overlay Networks and Gossip Protocols for Cloud Environments , 2009, OTM Conferences.

[5]  Maarten van Steen,et al.  CYCLON: Inexpensive Membership Management for Unstructured P2P Overlays , 2005, Journal of Network and Systems Management.

[6]  Anne-Marie Kermarrec,et al.  SCAMP: Peer-to-Peer Lightweight Membership Service for Large-Scale Group Communication , 2001, Networked Group Communication.

[7]  Anne-Marie Kermarrec,et al.  Network awareness and failure resilience in self-organizing overlay networks , 2003, 22nd International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, 2003. Proceedings..

[8]  Anne-Marie Kermarrec,et al.  From Epidemics to Distributed Computing , 2004 .

[9]  Anne-Marie Kermarrec,et al.  Probabilistic Reliable Dissemination in Large-Scale Systems , 2003, IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst..

[10]  Anne-Marie Kermarrec,et al.  HiScamp: self-organizing hierarchical membership protocol , 2002, EW 10.