Leveraging Social-Network Infrastructure to Improve Peer-to-Peer Overlay Performance: Results from Orkut

Application-level peer-to-peer (P2P) network overlays are an emerging paradigm that facilitates decentralization and flexibility in the scalable deployment of applications such as group communication, content delivery, and data sharing. However the construction of the overlay graph topology optimized for low latency, low link and node stress and lookup performance is still an open problem. We present a design of an overlay constructed on top of a social network and show that it gives a sizable improvement in lookups, average round-trip delay and scalability as opposed to other overlay topologies. We build our overlay on top of the topology of a popular real-world social network namely “Orkut”. We show Orkut’s suitability for our purposes by evaluating the clustering behavior of its graph structure and the socializing pattern of its members.