Tork: A Variable-Hop Overlay for Heterogeneous Networks

We present a new variable-hop peer-to-peer overlay that combines active stabilization and opportunistic maintenance to provide overlay nodes with a large range of hop-count versus peer bandwidth capabilities. Because of the variable-hop design, Tork is suitable for use in large-scale heterogeneous peer-to-peer networks where peers have a range of bandwidth capacities. For high-bandwidth peers Tork has O(I)-hop performance, and for low-bandwidth, most likely mobile peers, Tork has multi-hop performance. We further show that mapping overlay messaging to multi-destination routing in the underlay reduces Tork message overhead by up to 35%