Constructing Overlay Networks with Short Paths and Low Communication Cost

A Peer-To-Peer (P2P) application uses an overlay network which is a virtual network constructed over the physical network. Traditional overlay construction methods do not take physical location of nodes into consideration, resulting in a large amount of redundant traffic. Some proximity-aware construction methods have been proposed to address this problem. These methods typically connect nearby nodes in the physical network. However, as the number of nodes increases, the path length of a route between two distant nodes rapidly increases. To alleviate this problem, we propose a technique which can be incorporated in existing overlay construction methods. The idea behind this technique is to employ long links to directly connect distant nodes. Through simulation experiments, we show that using our proposed technique, networks can achieve small path length and low communication cost while maintaining high resiliency to failures.