Overlay Structure for Large Scale Content Sharing: Leveraging Geography as the Basis for Routing Locality

In this paper we place our arguments on two related issues in the design of generalized structured peer-to-peer overlays. First, we argue that for the large-scale content-sharing applications, lookup and content transport functions need to be treated separately. Second, to create a location-based routing overlay suitable for content sharing and other applications, we argue that off-the-shelf geographic coordinates of Internet-connected hosts can be used as a basis. We then outline the design principles and present a design for the generalized routing overlay based on adaptive hierarchical partitioning of the geographical space.