Handling Network Partitions and Mergers in Structured Overlay Networks

Structured overlay networks form a major class of peerto-peer systems, which are touted for their abilities to scale, tolerate failures, and self-manage. Any long-lived Internet-scale distributed system is destined to face network partitions. Although the problem of network partitions and mergers is highly related to fault-tolerance and self-management in large-scale systems, it has hardly been studied in the context of structured peer-to-peer systems. These systems have mainly been studied under churn (frequent joins/failures), which as a side effect solves the problem of network partitions, as it is similar to massive node failures. Yet, the crucial aspect of network mergers has been ignored. In fact, it has been claimed that ring-based structured overlay networks, which constitute the majority of the structured overlays, are intrinsically ill-suited for merging rings. In this paper, we present an algorithm for merging multiple similar ring-based overlays when the underlying network...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: P2P
• Authors: Tallat M. Shafaat, Ali Ghodsi, Seif Haridi
• Keywords: Network Partitions, P2P 2007, Peer-to-Peer Computing, Structured Overlay Networks, Structured Peer-to-peer Systems