Peer Discovery in Tree-Structured P2P Overlay Networks by Means of Connected Dominating Sets

Abstract

A Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network consists of a large number of nodes, where each node may have different capabilities and properties. Finding peers with specific capabilities and properties is challenging. Thus, we propose a practical solution to the problem of peer discovery, which is finding peers in the network according to a specified query. We contribute a peer discovery for an m-ary tree-structured P2P network by utilizing a connected dominating set (CDS), a technique that is typically used in unstructured networks. Our approach of constructing the CDS requires no additional communication cost, while nodes can insert, update and remove data within ${\mathcal{O}}(1)$. Each node of the CDS – a dominating set node – maintains only a limited number of nodes. We confirm the properties of our proposed solution by using the ns-3 discrete-event simulator. This includes, besides the degree of decentralism of the peer discovery, also the heterogeneity of peers.