Data indexing in peer-to-peer DHT networks

Peer-to-peer distributed hash table (DHT) systems make it simple to discover specific data when their complete identifiers - or keys - are known in advance. In practice, however, users looking up resources stored in peer-to-peer systems often have only partial information for identifying these resources. We describe techniques for indexing data stored in peer-to-peer DHT networks, and discovering the resources that match a given user query. Our system creates multiple indexes, organized hierarchically, which permit users to locate data even using scarce information, although at the price of a higher lookup cost. The data itself is stored on only one (or few) of the nodes. Experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our indexing techniques on a distributed peer-to-peer bibliographic database with realistic user query workloads.