Bounded diameter overlay construction: A self organized approach

Abstract

This paper describes a distributed algorithm to construct and maintain a peer-to-peer network overlay with bounded diameter. The proposed approach merges a bio-inspired self-organized behavior with a pure peer-to-peer approach, in order to adapt the overlay to underlying changes in the network topology. Ant colonies are used to collect and spread information across all peers, whereas pheromone trails help detecting crashed nodes. Construction of the network favors balanced distribution of links across all peers, so that the resulting topology does not exhibit large hubs. Fault resilience and recovery mechanisms have also been implemented to prevent network partition in the event of node crashes. Validation has been conducted through simulations of different network scenarios.