Scalable peer finding on the Internet

We consider the problem of finding nearby application peers over the Internet. We define a new peer-finding scheme (called Tiers) that scales to large application peer groups. Tiers creates a hierarchy of the peers, which allows an efficient and scalable solution to this problem. The scheme can be implemented entirely in the application-layer and does not require the deployment of either any additional measurement services, or well-known reference landmarks in the network. We present detailed evaluation of Tiers and compare it to one previously proposed scheme called Beaconing. Through analysis and detailed simulations on 10,000 node Internet-like topologies we show that Tiers achieves comparable or better performance with a significant reduction in control overheads for groups of size 32 or more.