Discovery and Composition of Communication Services in Peer-to-Peer Overlays

While today's peer-to-peer (P2P) communication applications offer limited services compared to existing enterprise telephony systems, in the future this is likely to change due to both new services being integrated in to the overlay and services being offered by third parties. We discuss several possible architectural choices related to service discovery methods to support this evolution, and consider factors such as load distribution, service granularity, and dynamic service attributes. We present several new results based on simulations, including (1) analysis of the sensitivity of call performance to media handling peer capacity, and (2) tradeoffs between service granularity, service selection time, and service load distribution in the overlay.