Approaching optimal peer-to-peer overlays

In unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, there exists a serious topology mismatch problem between physical and logical network. We first analyze the relationship between the property of the overlay and the corresponding message duplications incurred by queries in a given overlay, and prove that computing an optimal overlay with global knowledge is an NP-hard problem. Motivated by the analysis results, we design a distributed overlay optimization algorithm, THANCS, to attack topology mismatch. We demonstrate its performance by comprehensive simulations in dynamic environments. The proposed THANCS has three major strengths. First, it does not need any global knowledge. Second, its optimization convergent speed is fast. Third, it is orthogonal with other types of advanced search approaches.