Users wishing to find multimedia material about interesting events from all over the world are confronted with the problem of efficiently locating and retrieving media that meets their personal interests. One possible solution for this problem are peer-to-peer based networks to publish and broadcast descriptions of such events; however, such networks require an efficient and reliable infrastructure. Because of its properties, the hypercube concept allows efficient broadcast of event notifications and thus may serve well for such networks. In this paper we explore and discuss the quality of the hypercube concept as peer-to-peer topology. We provide a fully distributed reference implementation and analyze its strengths, weaknesses, and robustness, and compare it to one possible alternative, a hybrid hypercube network. Our analysis indicates that maintenance of a fully distributed, peer-to-peer based hypercube is questionable: In an environment where participants may unexpectedly enter and leave the network at any time (e.g. a cell phone leaving the area covered by the radio transmitting station), inconsistencies may cause the system to run into undefined states.

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