meridian title
A Lightweight Approach to Network Positioning

Meridian is a peer-to-peer overlay network for performing location-aware node and path selection in large-scale distributed systems. It provides a simple lightweight framework for keeping track of location information for participating nodes, without using virtual coordinates. Instead, it builds a distributed, failure resilient overlay graph, maintains the graph using a gossip protocol, and performs direct measurements in response to queries.

We have implemented three applications using the Meridian framework. Our applications currently (1) find the closest (lowest latency) node to a given target, (2) select the most centrally located node in a given set, and (3) discover a node within latency bounds of multiple targets. The system works by performing a multi-hop search where the node at each hop exponentially reduces the distance to a target within the solution space. The Meridian framework is used to provide a resilient, loosely structured overlay network that takes advantage of the rough conformance to triangle inequality of network latencies to intelligently reduce the necessary search space at each hop, allowing the system to be highly scalable.

We are currently examining whether Meridian can be applied to other positioning related problems.


->  Overview A high-level overview of Meridian.
->  Papers Paper trail.
->  Deployment A PlanetLab deployment consisting of 325 Meridian nodes is available for evaluation.
->  ClosestNode.Com Our DNS-based redirection service to the closest server.
->  Meridian Query Language Safe language specification for expressing localization queries. Check out the demo here.
->  Data Distribution Results of our Internet latency measurements.
->  Code Distribution The Meridian library for use in applications.
->  Related Work Pointers to other work in network location and positioning.
->  Support Our sources of research support.
->  People Project members.

Meridian Project

Computer Science Department
Cornell University