Peer-to-peer overlay networks have attracted considerable attention. The notion of end users collaborating to support a richer set of network services with no network infrastructure support has been well received. This is not surprising given the understandably slow rate of deployment for any service that requires changes to the Internet infrastructure.One communication paradigm that has come into the limelight with the advent of peer-to-peer networking is multipoint-to-point communication. A single "client" (requesting peer) can use multiple "servers" (supplying peers) to access the desired content, and gain from the resulting parallelization of the access.