HIERAS: a DHT based hierarchical P2P routing algorithm

Routing algorithm has great influence on system overall performance in peer-to-peer (P2P) applications. In current DHT based routing algorithms, routing tasks are distributed across all system peers. However, a routing hop could happen between two widely separated peers with high network link latency which greatly increases system routing overheads. We propose a new P2P routing algorithm - HIERAS to relieve this problem, it keeps scalability property of current DHT algorithms and improves system routing performance by the introduction of hierarchical structure. In HIERAS, we create several lower level P2P rings besides the highest level P2P ring. A P2P ring is a subset of the overall P2P overlay network. We create P2P rings in such a strategy that the average link latency between two peers in lower level rings is much smaller than higher level rings. Routing tasks are first executed in lower level rings before they go up to higher level rings, a large portion of routing hops previously executed in the global P2P ring are now replaced by hops in lower level rings, thus routing overheads can be reduced. The simulation results show HIERAS routing algorithm can significantly improve P2P system routing performance