Design and Scalability of NLS, a Scalable Naming and Location Service

This paper sketches the design, and presents a scalability analysis and evaluation of NLS, a scalable naming and location service. NLS resolves textual names to the nearest of a set of replicated objects associated with that name, and is designed to scale to the dimensions of a world-wide service. Applications include resolving Web URIs to the nearest cached or replicated object that provides the associated content. The key design goals of NLS are scalability, performance, availability and ease of administration. NLS is based on a dynamically configured, distributed search tree, with a fat-tree based topology at the global level and spanning trees at the local level. Analysis and preliminary empirical results obtained with a prototype implementation indicate that the system scales as expected.