Peer-to-peer community management using structured overlay networks

In this paper, we present a system for the distributed management of user communities. The system utilizes multiple DHT overlay networks where nodes communicate in a peer-to-peer manner. Our system works on top of a P2PSIP protocol implementation that carries out the DHT signaling. The key idea behind our system is to use one overlay network per community; this results in multiple small overlays that are subsets of the main overlay. We evaluate how the usage of small community-overlays affects the nodes' load, as opposed to doing all activities in the main overlay. We also evaluate how the maintenance of community-overlays affects the nodes' load. Finally, we observe the tradeoff between these two quantities; while multiple small overlays decrease DHT-related network traffic in community activities, the management of multiple overlays also introduces some additional load to the nodes.