Distributed top-down hierarchy construction

Hierarchies provide scalability in large networks and are integral to many widely-used protocols and applications. Previous approaches to constructing hierarchies have typically either assumed static hierarchy configuration, or have used bottom-up construction methods. We describe how to construct hierarchies in a top-down fashion, and show that our method is much more efficient than bottom-up methods. We also show that top-down hierarchy construction is a better choice when administrative policy constraints are imposed on hierarchy formation