Peer Discovery For Publish-Subscribe (A Circle Letter)

[MrMerkle]

I'm a newbie to BitTorrent.

 

When they were living, my mother, her parents and her siblings, would pass a circle letter among themselves.  The package would contain a letter from each person. When my mother would receive the package, she would remove her old letter, write a new letter, and send the package on to her sister.  They started this during WWII, and it lasted until 2005 when my mother was the last one.

 

I'm having to design and develop a P2P application that aggregates information about a specific topic.  The desired result would be for each node that is subscribed to a particular topic to have connection information for its predecessor and successor nodes.  The connection information would form a logical ring network (overlay) among the nodes. After peer discovery, a data package would be passed around the ring P2P with each node removing its old information, adding its new information, and sending the package to the successor node.  The package would continue around the ring until it was empty--when a node received an empty package it would pass it to the successor node (if any) and then remove itself from the ring.  The ring would have to heal itself if a node were to prematurely disconnect.

 

This would be kinda like a publish-subscribe (with update) environment, except that there cannot be a central server.

 

Does anyone have any thoughts along these lines?  Is there any CS literature that you could point to?

 

Thanks.