Overlay networks are used today in a variety of distributed systems ranging from file-sharing and storage systems to communication infrastructures. However, designing, building and adapting these overlays to the intended application and the target environment is a difficult and time consuming process.

To ease the development and the deployment of such overlay networks, we have implemented P2, a system which uses a declarative logic language to express the overlay networks in a highly compact and reusable form. P2 can express a Narada-style mesh network in 12 rules, and the Chord structured overlay in only 36 rules. P2 directly parses and executes such specifications using a dataflow architecture to construct and maintain the overlay networks. We describe the P2 approach, how our implementation works, and show by experiment that the performance of P2 overlays is acceptable.

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