Ripple: Toward a Substrate Middleware for Peer-to-Peer Applications

Peers in multiple P2P applications execute overlapped operations with different implementation, like neighbour management, resource publish/lookup, delay investigation, which leads to poor interoperability and unnecessary network load. Peers contribute their resources only when they stay in same application. We propose a P2P middleware, called Ripple, to accomplish common functions in a layered architecture. Ripple manages all peers running various applications in a uniform substrate overlay network. The substrate overlay is designed with a hybrid topology. This hybrid topology does not aim at only a particular type of applications, but also enables the flexibility for various applications. Our work is an attempt to address common needs of P2P applications, which may simplify the development and improve the performance of P2P networks, as well as mitigate the sampling stress to physical networks.