Storing and Indexing Spatial Data in P2P Systems

The peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm has become very popular for storing and sharing information in a totally decentralized manner. At first, research focused on P2P systems that host 1D data. Nowadays, the need for P2P applications with multidimensional data has emerged, motivating research on P2P systems that manage such data. The majority of the proposed techniques are based either on the distribution of centralized indexes or on the reduction of multidimensional data to one dimension. Our goal is to create from scratch a technique that is inherently distributed and also maintains the multidimensionality of data. Our focus is on structured P2P systems that share spatial information. We present SpatialP2P, a totally decentralized indexing and searching framework that is suitable for spatial data. SpatialP2P supports P2P applications in which spatial information of various sizes can be dynamically inserted or deleted, and peers can join or leave. The proposed technique preserves well locality and directionality of space.