Self-managing Overlays for Infrastructure-less Networks

Easy access to communication means and mobile devices are fostering the birth of systems that need to scale to high numbers of peers, adapt to high churn rates, and be performant and available even when the underlying network infrastructures are unreliable. A middleware that provides dynamic overlay management can support these needs, by providing efficient overlay bootstrapping, balancing, and self-healing. We present the Universe approach for creating and managing overlay networks in which peers are organized into proximity-based groups. Each group identifies an easily replaceable supervising peer that maintains the links within the group, and manages message congestions. The paper presents a set of detailed experiments that corroborate our approach, and compare it to well-known techniques from the state of the art.