A Scalable Bloom Filter for Membership Queries

Bloom filters allow membership queries over sets with allowable errors. It is widely used in databases, networks and distributed systems and it has great potential for distributed applications where systems need to share information about available data. However, the false positive errors are unavoidable, and the false positive rate increases intolerantly along with the date set expanding. To solve the scalability problem of Bloom filters, this paper presents a new design of a scalable Bloom filter (SBF) for an expanding data set. The SBF keeps a low false positive rate by adding Bloom filter vectors with double length when necessary. The paper proposes algorithms for element insertion and query operation of SBF by employing the H₃ class of universal hash functions. Theoretical and experimental results demonstrate that the new SBF provides false positive rate as low as 21.3% of the dynamic Bloom filter presented before and the querying CPU time increasing with logarithmic rather than linear. Therefore, the proposed SBF outperforms other current scalable Bloom filters significantly.