Thicket: A Protocol for Building and Maintaining Multiple Trees in a P2P Overlay.

M. Ferreira, J. Leitão, and L. Rodrigues.

Selected sections of this report were published in the proceedings of the 29th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), New Delhi, India, 31 October-3 November 2010.

Abstract

One way to efficiently disseminate information in a P2P overlay is to rely on a spanning tree. However, in a tree, interior nodes support a much higher load than leaf nodes. Also, the failure of a single node can break the tree, impairing the reliability of the dissemination protocol. These problems can be addressed by using multiple trees, such that each node is interior in just a few trees and a leaf node in the remaining; the multiple trees allow to achieve load distribution and also to send redundant information for fault-tolerance. This paper proposes Thicket, a decentralized algorithm to efficiently build and maintain such multiple trees over a single unstructured overlay network. The algorithm has been implemented and is extensively evaluated using simulation in a P2P overlay with 10.000 nodes.

Also available extended report (pdf)


Luís Rodrigues