HAIPE® peer discovery in a dynamic scaling architecture

Many distributed peer-to-peer networks require a discovery mechanism to learn the locations of, and services offered by, participating peers. The problem becomes more complicated when the services reside on a plaintext (trusted) network and communications occur over a ciphertext (untrusted) network. This paper describes the discovery problem where a large number of peers must be capable of both securely registering their location and services with the network, and securely querying network participants to locate peers and/or services. The targeted network environment includes up to 10⁶ nodes that may be fixed or mobile. These nodes may have limited bandwidth or intermittent availability. Also, the network end-to-end latency may be large. To address these constraints, the benefits of various types of solutions must be assessed. Tradeoffs between bandwidth requirements and convergence times for push versus pull mechanisms and proactive versus reactive mechanisms for data dissemination must be considered. Local storage requirements and query response time must be taken into account for solutions using local versus remote copy storage. And, the architecture, whether pure peer-to-peer or hierarchical, will be influenced by the required number of nodes and the size of the required database. Security poses an additional challenge as new nodes must be able to establish secure communications with existing nodes without creating either an intolerable delay or an unacceptable burden on network administrators.