PNRP Clouds
A PNRP "cloud" represents a set of nodes that can communicate with each other through the network. The term "cloud" is synonymous with "peer mesh" and "peer-to-peer graph".
Communication between nodes should never cross from one cloud to another. A Cloud instance is uniquely identified by its name, which is case-sensitive. A single peer or node may be connected to more than one cloud.
Clouds are tied very closely to network interfaces. On a multi-homed machine with two network cards attached to different subnets, three clouds will be returned: one for each of the link local addresses per interface, and a single global scope cloud.
PNRP uses three cloud "scopes", in which a scope is a grouping of computers that are able to find each other:
The global cloud corresponds to the global IPv6 address scope and global addresses and represents all the computers on the entire IPv6 Internet. There is only a single global cloud.
The link-local cloud corresponds to the link-local IPv6 address scope and link-local addresses. A link-local cloud is for a specific link, which is typically the same as the locally attached subnet. There can be multiple link-local clouds.
A third cloud, the site-specific cloud, corresponds to the site IPv6 address scope and site-local addresses. This cloud has been deprecated, although it is still supported in PNRP.
Clouds
PNRP clouds are represented by instances of the Cloud class. Groups of clouds used a peer are represented by instances of the enumerable CloudCollection class. Collections of PNRP clouds known to the current peer can be obtained by calling the static GetAvailableClouds method.
Individual clouds have unique names, represented as a 256 character Unicode string. These names, along with the above-mentioned scope, are used to construct unique instances of the Cloud class. These instances can be serialized and reconstructed for persistent usage.
Once a Cloud instance is created or obtained, peer names can be registered with it to create a mesh of known peers.