Apocrypha: Making P2P Overlays Network-aware

Abstract

A peer-to-peer(P2P) system consists of a dynamic set of nodes that organizes itself in an overlay network. In general, this overlay network may have nothing to do with the location of nodes on the physical network. We propose a generic mechanism called Apocrypha to make any P2P overlay ``network-aware'', and thus improve its quality, using topology-preserving transformations. We demonstrate the applicability and utility of Apocrypha on two different P2P systems: the Chord system which uses a deterministic overlay topology, and the Gnutella system which operates on an ad hoc topology. We also describe new, improved routing protocols for the Chord system, and introduce the long-circuit phenomenon in Gnutella.