H-Pastry: An Adaptive Multi-Level Overlay Inter-Network

Overlay networks are widely used for locating and disseminating information, by means of custom routing and forwarding on top of the underlying network. Distributed Hash Table (DHT) based overlays provide flexibility coupled with good scalability and load balancing properties. However, this comes at the cost of inefficient routing, caused by the lack of adaptation to the underlying network: current DHT designs often overlook physical network proximity, administrative boundaries and inter-domain routing policies, or a combination thereof. In this paper, the authors show how to construct a DHT-based overlay network that takes all these aspects into account.