A Lightweight Approach to Network Positioning

Abstract

This paper describes a peer-to-peer overlay network for performing location-aware node and path selection in large-scale distributed systems. Our system, Meridian, provides a simple, lightweight and scalable framework for keeping track of location-information for participating nodes. The framework is based on local, relative coordinate systems in multi-resolution rings, direct measurement with scalable node-to-node handoff, and gossip protocols for dissemination. Large scale simulations and an implementation deployed on PlanetLab show that the framework can locate the closest node to given target with less than a 5ms median error, and the simplicity of the approach lends itself to a compact implementation.