On the challenge of assessing overlay topology adaptation mechanisms

This thesis is that a peer-to-peer network's overlay topology should adapt to match the demand graph of the peer-to-peer network. In order to assess the effectiveness of various adaptation mechanisms, a comparison with an optimal topology for a given demand graph would be helpful. However, several related optimization/decision problems have been shown to be NP-hard. The contributions of this paper are threefold: i) NP-hardness results related to assessing overlay adaptation strategies were briefly surveyed, ii) a specific optimization problem and metric was presented, and iii) experimental results indicating the potential of optimizing the overlay topology were provided. Finally, in the spirit of a 'challenge paper' various open issues were stated and discussed.