Flocks: Interest-Based Construction of Overlay Networks

Self-organizing overlay networks have received a lot of attention in the recent years. However, despite the popularity of content-aware and topology-aware overlay networks, surprisingly little research has been done to combine both approaches. In this paper, we create robust and flexible overlay networks that we call "Flocks", which can be content-aware, topology-aware, or a combination of both. We model affinity with interests and properties and show the resulting overlay networks work in a decentralized, self-organizing way, and stabilize quickly.