Building low-diameter peer-to-peer networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing has emerged as a significant paradigm for providing distributed services, in particular search and data sharing. Current P2P networks (e.g., Gnutella) are constructed by participants following their own uncoordinated (and often whimsical) protocols; they consequently suffer from frequent network overload and partitioning into disconnected pieces separated by choke points with inadequate bandwidth. We propose a protocol for participants to build P2P networks in a distributed fashion, and prove that it results in connected networks of constant degree and logarithmic diameter. These properties are crucial for efficient search and data exchange. An important feature of our protocol is that it operates without global knowledge of all the nodes in the network.