LIGHT: An efficient hash tree based indexing scheme over DHTs

A Distributed Hash Table (DHT) is a class of decentralized distributed system that provides a lookup service similar to a hash table. DHTs form an infrastructure that can be used to build more complex services such as distributed file systems, peer-to-peer file sharing and content distribution systems, cooperative web caching, multicast, domain name services, and instant messaging. DHT can retrieve the records from database, only when an exact match is found and complex queries are not supported. One of the solutions to support complex queries is to build Index on the top of DHTs. But the existing Indexing-Based DHT such as Prefix Hash Tree (PHT) also suffer from query inefficiency and high maintenance cost. An efficient indexing scheme namely LIGhtweight Hash Tree (LIGHT) is proposed here for supporting complex queries. LIGHT uses a novel naming mechanism and a tree summarization strategy for distribution of its index structure. It provides fast retrieval of data and hence will reduce the processing time and overhead.