Peer Discovery

The Peer Discovery layer is responsible for finding peers storing requested content. This is done by creating a new virtual network topology (i.e. an overlay network). This layer is both performance and reliability critical as it provides a basis for the rest of the distributed system.

One also needs to define what exactly is the result of a peer discovery search. A naive solution based on a simple Kademlia search will return nodes whose ID is the most similar to the requested one. This is not enough for the purposes of this project, as described in the Motivation section.

Therefore, it is assumed that a search can return any peer if it knows the path to the destination.