A Study of Discovery Mechanisms for Peer-to-Peer Applications

Peer-to-peer applications allow peers to connect or disconnect from a network at any time and are based on a loosely coupled resource distribution model. As a result, robust and efficient discovery mechanisms are central to the efficient functioning of such applications. In this paper we evaluate four discovery mechanisms (flooding and the forward routing algorithms CHORD, Pastry and CAN) against the requirements of three prevalent classes of peer-to-peer applications, and investigate the suitability of these mechanisms for the applications.