Regularising amorphous peer-to-peer networks with overlay grids generated locally

PhD ceremony: Ms. P. Sukjit, 11.00 uur, Aula Academiegebouw, Broerstraat 5, Groningen

Dissertation: Regularising amorphous peer-to-peer networks with overlay grids generated locally

Promotor(s): prof. N. Petkov, prof. M. Aiello

Faculty: Mathematics and Natural Sciences

Various ICT applications like those connected with world-wide logistics chains require to handle huge amounts of data as well as to connect complex workflows in flexible and on-time ways. To meet these needs, a communication platform is devised enabling to reflect corresponding business and social relations in logical structures for decentralised networks of heterogeneous computing nodes, and not requiring any further infrastructure such as mainframes or servers.

This is achieved by novel algorithms generating regular logical layers in form of hole-free and non-overlapping rectangular grids on top of existing amorphous physical networks to support the data processing needed by problem-oriented connectivity. These methods' main advantage is that they work locally, i.e. without global knowledge of entire networks. As an important application, the algorithms give rise to a novel approach for message routing allowing to track items equipped with Radio Frequency Identification tags. For numerous further uses, a generalised, biologically inspired algorithm is derived which can locally generate any planar cell structure coverable by a connected graph. Intensive simulations confirm that the structure-building methods introduced are fast enough to react to changes of systems and application requirements in real time. As a result, it is argued that fully decentralised approaches as the one introduced have abilities of self-organisation and can significantly increase scalability, flexibility, fault-tolerance and robustness. Thus, 20-50% of the manual work for IT system administration may be saved.