A decentralized scheme for network-aware reliable overlay construction

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are often constructed in overlay networks at the application layer without taking the physical network topologies into consideration. The mismatch between physical topologies and logical overlays can cause a large volume of redundant traffic and considerable performance degradation of the P2P systems. In order to alleviate this mismatching problem, we propose an algorithm that iteratively reshapes the topology of an overlay. The algorithm is fully decentralized and only relies on local information available at each node. Also, the algorithm preserves the total number of links during the process of iterative modifications, thus maintaining the resiliency to failures.