Failure-Tolerant Overlay Trees for Large-Scale Dynamic Networks

Trees are fundamental structures for data dissemination in large-scale network scenarios. However, their inherent fragility has led researchers to rely on more redundant mesh topologies in the presence of churn or other highly dynamic settings. In this paper, instead, we outline a novel protocol that directly and efficiently maintains a tree overlay in the presence of churn. It simultaneously achieves other beneficial properties such as limiting the maximum node degree, minimizing the extent of the tree topology changes resulting from failures, and limiting the number of nodes affected by each topology change. Applicability to a range of distributed applications is discussed and results are evaluated through extensive simulation and a PlanetLab deployment.