Build One, Get One Free: Leveraging the Coexistence of Multiple P2P Overlay Networks

Many different P2P overlay networks providing various functionalities, targeting specific applications, have been proposed in the past five years. It is now reasonable to consider that multiple overlays may be deployed over a large set of nodes so that the most appropriate overlay might be chosen depending on the application. A physical peer may then host several instances of logical peers belonging to different overlay networks. In this paper, we show that the coexistence of a structured P2P overlay and an unstructured one may be leveraged so that, by building one, the other is automatically constructed as well. More specifically, we show that the randomness provided by an unstructured gossip-based overlay can be used to build the routing table of a structured P2P overlay and the randomness in the numerical proximity links in the structured networks provides the random peer sampling required by gossip-based unstructured overlays. In this paper, we show that maintaining the leaf set of Pastry and the proximity links of an unstructured overlay is enough to build the complete overlays. Simulation results comparing our approach with both a Pastry-like system and a gossip-based unstructured overlay show that we significantly reduce the overlay maintenance overhead without sacrificing the performance.