Structured Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay networks are scalable and efficient networks. This efficiency comes at a cost as there is a need for regular maintenance of an overlay structure to handle the continuous churn of peers. This results in huge overhead in terms of maintenance traffic generated by peers. This problem becomes more critical when logical overlay topology differs from actual physical network topology, a common phenomenon in P2P overlay networks. In this paper, we present a novel approach to designing a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) based P2P overlays with the help of Software Defined Networks (SDN) concepts. SDN is an upcoming technology that provides enough flexibility in deciding application-specific network policies and rules dynamically. In our approach, we have attempted to bring the overlay topology closer to actual physical topology and reduce the maintenance traffic as much as possible. We have also tested our work on a hybrid network consisting of both virtual and physical switches. The experimental results suggest and establish the applicability of our approach.

结构化对等（P2P）覆盖网络是可扩展且高效的网络。这种效率是有代价的，因为需要定期维护覆盖结构以应对同伴的连续搅动。就对等方生成的维护流量而言，这导致了巨大的开销。当逻辑覆盖拓扑结构与实际的物理网络拓扑结构不同时，此问题变得更加严重，这是P2P覆盖网络中的常见现象。在本文中，我们提出了一种借助软件定义网络（SDN）概念设计基于分布式哈希表（DHT）的P2P覆盖的新颖方法。SDN是一项即将到来的技术，可为动态确定特定于应用程序的网络策略和规则提供足够的灵活性。在我们的方法中，我们试图使覆盖拓扑更接近实际物理拓扑，并尽可能减少维护流量。我们还在包含虚拟和物理交换机的混合网络上测试了我们的工作。实验结果表明并建立了我们方法的适用性。