Virtual Connections in P2P Overlays with DHT-Based Name to Address Resolution

Overview & Synopsis

Current Internet applications are still mainly bound to their transport layer connections. This prevents many features such as end-to-end security and mobility from functioning smoothly in a dynamic network. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for decoupling communication from their supporting devices. This enforces the complete separation of devices, applications and entities such as users, services and data. Our architecture is based on a peer-topeer overlay network where each peer has a permanent name and a variable address which depends on its position in the overlay. In order to dynamically map names to addresses, our architecture provides its own distributed hash table system. After presenting the design of our architecture, we provide a scalability analysis and by performing simulations, we assess its efficiency. Simulation results show that our overlay using a name to address resolution based on a distributed hash table is scalable and has acceptable performances given the flexibility it can provide to applications.