Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have enjoyed immense attention and have been widely deployed on the Internet for well over a decade. often implemented via an overlay network abstraction atop the Internet’s best-effort IP infrastructure. P2P systems support a plethora of desirable features to distributed applications including anonymity, high availability, robustness, load balancing, quality of service and scalability to name just a few. Unfortunately, inherent weaknesses of early deployments of P2P systems, prevented applications from leveraging the full potential of the paradigm. One major weakness, identified early on, is the topology mismatch problem between the overlay network and the underlying IP topology. This mismatch can impose an extraordinary amount of unnecessary stress on network resources and can adversely affect both the scalability and efficiency of the operating applications. In this paper, we survey over a decade’s worth of research efforts aimed at alleviating th...