Fault-tolerant 2-tier P2P based service discovery in PIRST-ON

Scaleable and fault tolerant architectures that protect communication flows through diverse paths have a fundamental problem to solve. Especially in distributed systems - like the Internet - it is not trivial to find necessary vertex-and edge disjoint paths. This paper presents a new distributed service discovery architecture that can solve this problem. The key idea of our approach is, to route the traffic on the alternate path - in an overlay network - through a single autonomous system that is not part of the original data path. We show that, if this autonomous system is selected in an "intelligent" way, most of the hops of the original data path can be bypassed by this diverse path. Our approach builds on a new 2-tier peer to peer (P2P) signalling architecture. The lower tier consist of several P2P networks that are each limited to the boundaries of single autonomous systems. The higher tier in our architecture connects selected peers from different autonomous systems. Based on this flat hierarchy, our service discovery architecture is scaleable and due to the P2P nature, inherently fault tolerant.