Reply To: Sending and receiving application messages through overlay (in this case Chord)

[Kalman]

Just to add some further insights,

the said application is a monitoring mechanism, which uses the contacts in overlay to exchange monitoring related message. For example, a gossip based monitoring solution is only interested in sending gossip messages over the existing links. Ideally, it gets the list of contacts from the overlay, irrelevant whether it is a KBR-DHT-overlay or an unstructured overlay and sends to a selection of these links a few messages.

Thus the application requires an overlay, in specific a set of open connections (the links to the neighbors), but does not further restrict the type of overlay.
How can one implement such an application best?