Through the wormhole: Low cost, fresh peer sampling for the Internet

State of the art gossip protocols for the Internet are based on the assumption that connection establishment between peers comes at negligible cost. Our experience with commercially deployed P2P systems has shown that this cost is much higher than generally assumed. As such, peer sampling services often cannot provide fresh samples because the service would require too high a connection establishment rate. In this paper, we present the wormhole-based peer sampling service (WPSS). WPSS overcomes the limitations of existing protocols by executing short random walks over a stable topology and by using shortcuts (wormholes), thus limiting the rate of connection establishments and guaranteeing freshness of samples, respectively.We show that our approach can decrease the connection establishment rate by one order of magnitude compared to the state of the art while providing the same levels of freshness of samples. This, without sacrificing the desirable properties of a PSS for the Internet, such as robustness to churn and NAT-friendliness. We support our claims with a thorough measurement study in our deployed commercial system as well as in simulation.