Papnet: A Proximity-aware Alphanumeric Overlay Supporting Ganesan On-Line Load Balancing

Many structured Peer-to-Peer-Systems (P2P) have been developed over the past years. However, most of them rely on hash-functions and thus put major restrictions on applications being implemented on top of them. In this paper we present a very detailed description of Papnet, a hash-free P2P overlay-network that supports range-queries and realizes an infinite alphanumeric address space that can be used to store arbitrarily skewed data. We show how Papnet is able to distribute load amongst its nodes using the Ganesan On-Line Load Balancing providing a constant imbalance ratio while still being able to perform proximity routing, reaching each participating node with a latency being only roughly twice the direct latency. Further, we introduce a join-algorithm that provides Papnet with high fault-tolerance properties. We evaluated Papnet in a real distributed environment by setting up a network consisting of 50,000 nodes.