Self-organizing peer-to-peer (p2p) overlay networks like CAN, Chord, Pastry and Tapestry (also called distributed hash tables or DHTs) offer a novel platform for a variety of scalable and decentralized distributed applications. These systems provide efficient and fault-tolerant routing, object location, and load balancing within a self-organizing overlay network. One important aspect of these systems is how they exploit network proximity in the underlying Internet.