Distributed Object Location in a Dynamic Network

Kirsten Hildrum
John Kubiatowicz
Satish Rao
Ben Y. Zhao

Invited Submission to TOCS (Theory of Computing Systems)
Expanded Version of the SPAA 2002 Paper

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Paper Abstract

Modern networking applications replicate data and services widely, leading to a need for location-independent routing -- the ability to route queries directly to objects using names independent of the objects' physical locations. Two important properties of a routing infrastructure are routing locality and rapid adaptation to arriving and departing nodes. We show how these two properties can be efficiently achieved for certain network topologies. To do this, we present a new distributed algorithm that can solve the nearest-neighbor problem for these networks. We describe our solution in the context of Tapestry, an overlay network infrastructure that employs techniques proposed by Plaxton, Rajaraman, and Richa.