Peer Discovery in Tree-Structured P2P Overlay Networks by Means of Connected Dominating Sets

A Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network consists of a large number of nodes, where each node may have different capabilities and properties. Finding peers with specific capabilities and properties is challenging. Thus, we propose a practical solution to the problem of peer discovery, which is finding peers in the network according to a specified query. We contribute a peer discovery for an m-ary tree-structured P2P network by utilizing a connected dominating set (CDS), a technique that is typically used in unstructured networks. Our approach of constructing the CDS requires no additional communication cost, while nodes can insert, update and remove data within O(1). Each node of the CDS - a dominating set node - maintains only a limited number of nodes. We confirm the properties of our proposed solution by using the ns-3 discrete-event simulator. This includes, besides the degree of decentralism of the peer discovery, also the heterogeneity of peers.