An Optimal Overlay Topology for Routing Peer-to-Peer Searches

Unstructured peer-to-peer networks are frequently used as the overlay in various middleware toolkits for emerging applications, from content discovery to query result caching to distributed collaboration. Often it is assumed that unstructured networks will form a power-law topology; however, a power-law structure is not the best topology for an unstructured network. In this paper, we introduce the square-root topology, and show that this topology significantly improves routing performance compared to power-law networks. In the square-root topology, the degree of a peer is proportional to the square root of the popularity of the content at the peer. Our analysis shows that this topology is optimal for random walk searches. We also present simulation results to demonstrate that the square-root topology is better, by up to a factor of two, than a power-law topology for other types of search techniques besides random walks. We then describe a decentralized algorithm for forming a square-root topology, and evaluate its effectiveness in constructing efficient networks using both simulations and experiments with our implemented prototype. Our results show that the squareroot topology can provide a significant performance improvement over power-law topologies and other topology types.