ABSTRACT

At the heart of any distributed system lies some kind of logical interconnecting structure, also called overlay network, which supports the exchange of information between the different sites. With an increasing scale, distributed systems are likely to become more dynamic and have to deal with sites continuously entering and leaving the system. Reasons for a dynamic membership include, for example, site failures, sites which have to be updated and replaced by new sites, or the addition of new sites or resources which are required to preserve the functionality of the system. Hence, any large-scale distributed system needs an overlay network that supports joining, leaving, and routing between the sites. Without a scalable implementation of such a network, it is impossible to build large high-performance distributed systems.