IAMIN: An Infrastructure-aware Middleware for the Reconfiguration of Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Overlay Networks

Abstract

Peer to peer networks have become one of the most popular networking methods because of their flexibility and many use cases such as file sharing and distributed computations. Unstructured overlay peer to peer networks are one of key components of peer to peer systems that are considerable because of their low cost in network construction and maintenance. One of the main challenges in unstructured peer to peer overlay networks is the topology mismatch between overlay network and the underlying physical infrastructure. The root of this challenge is lack of awareness about peers in the network infrastructure during connection to and disconnection from overlay network, in addition to the neighbor selection mechanism in the overlay network. Different types of awareness of network infrastructure includes awareness of the location of internet service providers. Also awareness of proximity, geographical location and resources of peers. In this article we present a middleware which configures overlay network by using public measurements and the estimated delay among peers in order to have the most conformity with the topology of physical infrastructure. To evaluate the performance, our middleware is implemented on the top of Gnutella which is an unstructured overlay peer-to-peer network. Our simulations show that our middleware enhances the conformity of overlay network to the topology of physical network infrastructure. In addition, it improved the average throughput and the average delay.