The P-Grid System - Overview

P-Grid [1] is an efficient infrastructure to perform lookup and search operations in large-scale and highly dynamic peer-to-peer systems. P-Grid has been designed to account for several requirements and features of P2P systems. It provides a decentralized solution where adaptability to environmental conditions is a driving factor. On the one hand, P-Grid provides an efficient structured overlay based on the concept of a distributed trie to achieve highly efficient lookup operations. Moreover, it achieves key order preservation to support range queries. On the other hand, P-Grid can utilize the underlying unstructured substrate to permit its operation in highly dynamic environments where structured approaches require high maintenance cost of the topology and the distributed index. The basic functionality of the structured P-Grid is building a decentralized index of shared resources remaining at resource providers and performing efficient queries. The basic concepts of P-Grid will be described in more details in the following subsection, followed by an architecture overview and the implementation description.