A survey of P2P overlays in various networks

Overlay networks based on the P2P paradigm have been successfully employed to facilitate reliable data transport. They are used to improve the dependability of traffic flows between end-hosts without changing the underlying infrastructure. By observing connections between neighbours, the overlay can predict the statistical behaviour of the network and can thus select proper routes. In particular, if network capabilities are limited and failure recovery times are high, P2P routing overlays achieve significant performance improvements and better resource usage. This paper surveys P2P overlays in various networks such as ad hoc networks, sensor networks and WLANs. There has been much interest in emerging Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network overlays because they provide a good substrate for creating large-scale data sharing, content distribution and application-level multicast applications. These P2P networks try to provide a long list of features such as: selection of nearby peers, redundant storage, efficient search/location of data items, data permanence or guarantees, hierarchical naming, trust and authentication, and, anonymity. P2P networks potentially offer an efficient routing architecture that is self-organizing, massively scalable, and robust in the wide-area, combining fault tolerance, load balancing and explicit notion of locality.