Chameleon: An Adaptable 2-Tier Variable Hop Overlay

Structured peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays typically offer either multi-hop or one-hop performance. Here we present Chameleon, which offers a variable hop performance trading hop count with bandwidth requirement. Chameleon combines opportunistic and active routing table maintenance techniques into a novel two-tier approach which allows nodes to adapt to variations in their available bandwidth. Chameleon uses opportunistic routing table updates for lower bandwidth nodes and active stabilization for high bandwidth nodes, offering a performance from O(log n)-hop up to O(1)-hops. In doing so its nodes can operate successfully in large scale (mobile) networks where peers need to adapt to continuous changes in the available bandwidth. This paper presents a detailed design of Chameleon and simulation results verify its adaptable performance. We show that significant synergy between the two tiers improves the performance when compared with the standalone algorithms.