THON: A Tessellation-based Hierarchical Overlay Network for DGET Grid Middleware

P2P and grid computing are two paradigms that are increasingly used in today´s computing environments; their potential to provide better quality of service to users is very promising compared to the cost involved. This paper presents a hierarchical virtual network topology built on top of a physical one, which is used to manage distributed resources in a grid environment. The virtual topology defines an efficient and robust virtual machine, which will serve as a distributed computing platform. This topology is called THON (tessellation-based hierarchical overlay network) and is the successor of the Treep topology. THON is exploited in DGET, a data-grid middleware environment, and provides P2P resource discovery and load balancing. Here, we present the virtual topology theoretically and we show that this topology is very scalable, robust, load-balanced, and easy to construct and maintain. The topology efficiently exploits the heterogeneity of the network while limiting the overhead introduced by the overlay maintenance.