Distributed Data Location in a Dynamic Network

Modern networking applications replicate data and services widely, leading to a need for locationindependent routing – the ability to route queries directly to objects using names that are independent of the objects’ physical locations. Two important properties of a routing infrastructure are routing locality and rapid adaptation to arriving and departing nodes. We show how these two properties can be achieved with an efficient solution to the nearest-neighbor problem. We present a new distributed algorithm that can solve the nearest-neighbor problem for a restricted metric space. We describe our solution in the context of Tapestry, an overlay network infrastructure that employs techniques proposed by Plaxton, Rajaraman, and Richa [16].