tman-wrtc

Keywords: T-Man, configurable network topology, WebRTC

This project aims to provide an implementation of the T-Man [1] using WebRTC. T-Man is a protocol that builds an overlay network based on descriptors. Created by the developer, and exploiting the descriptors, a fitness function allows choosing the right neighborhood. For instance, implementing the distributed hash table Chord on top of T-Man is possible [2].

Principle

As the screenshot shows, each peer maintains a random peer-sampling protocol (on the left) which allows clustering protocols to avoid local minima, and a clustering protocol (on the right) that collects, sorts, and keeps descriptors along with sockets. On this example, descriptors are numbers and each peer keeps 4 neighbors: its closest in terms of euclidean distance. After a few shufflings, this overlay network remains stable, for peers do not leave nor join the network, and descriptors are not updated. Peers iterate over closer-and-closer neighbors until they reach their optimal position. On the opposite, the random peer-sampling protocol stays dynamic over time.

Installation

$ npm install tman-wrtc

References

[1] M. Jelasity, A. Montresor, and O. Babaoglu. T-man: Gossip-based fast overlay topology construction Comput. Netw., vol. 53, no. 13, pp. 2321-2339, 2009.

[2] A. Montresor, M. Jelasity, O. Babaoglu, Chord on Demand Fifth IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P'05), pp. 87-94, 2005.