Resilience of Dynamic Overlays through Local Interactions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a self-organizing protocol for unstructured P2P overlay networks that maintains network resilience against node failures through local interactions and minimal neighbor knowledge.

Contribution

It presents a novel, simple local interaction protocol enabling unstructured overlays to remain connected despite node churn.

Findings

The protocol effectively prevents network partitioning during node departures.

Simulations show high resilience of the network under various conditions.

Minimal neighbor knowledge suffices for maintaining network connectivity.

Abstract

This paper presents a self-organizing protocol for dynamic (unstructured P2P) overlay networks, which allows to react to the variability of node arrivals and departures. Through local interactions, the protocol avoids that the departure of nodes causes a partitioning of the overlay. We show that it is sufficient to have knowledge about 1st and 2nd neighbours, plus a simple interaction P2P protocol, to make unstructured networks resilient to node faults. A simulation assessment over different kinds of overlay networks demonstrates the viability of the proposal.