AFT: Adaptive and fault tolerant peer-to-peer overlay-A user-centric solution for data sharing

The widespread of interconnectable computers gives systems the chance to operate more efficiently, by better utilizing the cooperation between individual components. User-centric solutions address the devices themselves and, since there is no network infrastructure and a device powerful enough to assume the role of a coordinator, adopting a peer-to-peer model tends to be the best solution. In this paper we propose AFT, an overlay that adapts to a changing number of nodes, is resilient to faults and is the foundation for an efficient implementation of a reputation based trust system. The AFT overlay is designed to be a solution for systems that need to share transient information, performing a synchronization between various components, like in mobile ad-hoc networks, M2M networks, urban networks, and wireless sensor networks. The operations supported by the overlay, like joining, leaving, unicast transmission, broadcast sharing and maintenance can be accomplished in a duration belonging to O(N), where N is the number of nodes which are part of the structure. We proved these properties and we evaluate the time performance related to overlay creation and node joining.