HiOPS overlay - efficient provision of multicast in peer-to-peer systems

During the last few years the application scope of peer-to-peer systems has been notably extended. While the problems of scalable data localization have been exhaustively addressed, one may notice that the problem of multicast cost and latency delays in very large, global scale peer-to-peer networks still remains inadequately considered. Many large scale applications will suffer from this multicast cost if the number of users increases. In order to address this problem, we introduce HiOPS - a hierarchical two tier peer-to-peer system which provides a reasonable tradeoff between minimization of multicast cost and latency delays and reduction of maintenance and management cost. Because of its properties and characteristics HiOPS can be considered as a basic infrastructure for a wide range of peer-to-peer applications.