Peer-to-Peer Community Management Using Structured Overlay Networks

In this paper, the authors present a system for the distributed management of user communities. The system utilizes multiple DHT overlay networks where nodes communicate in a peer-to-peer manner. Their system works on top of a P2PSIP protocol implementation that carries out the DHT signaling. The key idea behind their system is to use one overlay network per community; this results in multiple small overlays that are subsets of the main overlay. They evaluate how the usage of small community-overlays affects the nodes' load, as opposed to doing all activities in the main overlay. They also evaluate how the maintenance of community-overlays affects the nodes' load.