Hierarchical addressing and routing mechanisms for distributed applications over heterogeneous networks

Abstract. Although distributed applications such as grids and peerto-peer technologies are quickly evolving, their deployment across heterogeneous networks such as non-globally addressable networks has not received much attention. The lack of IP addressing space for instance has created an explosion of network address translators and thus a large amount of non-globally addressable hosts. Whereas these boxes do not disturb much the behavior of a client-server communication, this is no longer true in a distributed application built on the peer-to-peer model where any entity can play both roles and thus needs a globally known address. Application level gateways are proposed to solve this problem but there are usually specific to a given distributed application. In this paper we propose an application level addressing scheme and a routing mechanism in order to overcome the non-global addressing limitation of heterogeneous networks such as those brought by network address translation technologies. Our architecture is designed to bring increased scalability and flexibility for communications between members of a distributed application. We give simulation results concerning the efficiency of the addressing and routing mechanisms.