A peer-to-peer network positioning architecture

Many network-based applications either rely on knowledge of the network topology or can benefit from dynamic adaptation to the changing network environments. This need is particularly essential for the emerging peer-to-peer distributed systems and mobile agent computing. To support efficient implementation of such applications, a network positioning model is necessary for capturing physical/abstract location information of network nodes. Some proposed solutions use a coordinate-based approach to estimate the logical distances among the hosts in the Internet. The coordinate/location information is either provided by a centralized server or derived in a distributed fashion by some landmarks. These approaches often suffer some deficiency in accuracy or scalability. This paper proposes a peer-to-peer architecture to address these problems by completely eliminating the need for landmarks.