A survey and comparison of peer-to-peer overlay network schemes

TLDR

The Internet’s computing and communications environments are complex and chaotic, lacking centralized control, which has spurred interest in peer‑to‑peer (P2P) overlays that enable large‑scale data sharing, content distribution, and multicast while offering features such as peer selection, redundancy, efficient search, data permanence, hierarchical naming, trust, authentication, anonymity, and scalable, fault‑tolerant routing. The article surveys and compares structured and unstructured P2P overlay networks. The authors categorize schemes into structured and unstructured groups and discuss their application‑level performance. The comparison highlights performance distinctions between the two groups of P2P overlays.

Abstract

Over the Internet today, computing and communications environments are significantly more complex and chaotic than classical distributed systems, lacking any centralized organization or hierarchical control. There has been much interest in emerging Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network overlays because they provide a good substrate for creating large-scale data sharing, content distribution, and application-level multicast applications. These P2P overlay networks attempt to provide a long list of features, such as: selection of nearby peers, redundant storage, efficient search/location of data items, data permanence or guarantees, hierarchical naming, trust and authentication, and anonymity. P2P networks potentially offer an efficient routing architecture that is self-organizing, massively scalable, and robust in the wide-area, combining fault tolerance, load balancing, and explicit notion of locality. In this article we present a survey and comparison of various Structured and Unstructured P2P overlay networks. We categorize the various schemes into these two groups in the design spectrum, and discuss the application-level network performance of each group.