DPTree: A balanced tree based indexing framework for peer-to-peer systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have been widely used for exchange of voluminous information and resources among thousands or even millions of users. Since shared data are normally identified by multiple attributes, a fundamental issue in P2P systems is to efficiently support complex queries on multi-dimensional data. Prior works suffer from some fundamental limitations, such as being constrained to support certain types of queries, excessive maintenance overheads, and etc. In this study, we propose a framework, called distributed peer tree (DPTree), which efficiently supports various types of queries on multi-dimensional data in P2P systems based on balanced tree indexes. DPTree achieves the efficiency through the following designs: 1) distributing the tree structure among peers in a way preserving the nice properties of balanced tree structures yet avoiding single points of failure and performance bottlenecks; 2) organizing peers into an overlay structure that enables efficient navigation yet is easy to maintain; 3) an efficient navigation algorithm; 4) an innovative wavelet-based load balancing mechanism. Through extensive performance evaluation, we verify the superiority of DPTree over existing works.