Distributed Indexing for Resource Discovery in P2P Networks

P2P networks facilitate people belonging to a community to share resources of interest. However, discovering resources in a large scale P2P network poses a number of challenges. Although distributed hash table (DHT) structured P2P networks have shown enhanced scalability in routing messages, they only support key based exact matches. This paper presents DIndex, a distributed indexing component that can be used in P2P networks in support of range queries. DIndex introduces the concept of search dimensions for partitioning a search space, and it organizes peer nodes in a three-layered structure. Experimental results show that, for aP2P network with N number of peers, the average number of hops per message is less than log(N).