Grapes: topology-based hierarchical virtual network for peer-to-peer lookup services

Peer-to-peer systems and applications are distributed systems without any centralized control. The core operation in most peer-to-peer systems is efficient location of data items. The current well-known peer-to-peer systems like Napster and Gnutella have scalability problem in location of data items. To solve the scalability problem, some scalable peer-to-peer lookup services show up, such as CAN, Chord, Pastry and Tapestry. In this paper we propose a self organizing hierarchical virtual network infrastructure, called Grapes, for peer-to-peer lookup services. Hierarchical approach of Grapes brings two benefits. First, a node can find data in its subnetwork with the high probability due to the data replication in its subnetwork. Second, the hierarchical structure makes lookup hops shorter than those of the flat one.