Load Balancing and Range Queries in P2P Systems Using P-Ring

In peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, computers from around the globe share data and can participate in distributed computation. P2P became famous, and infamous, due to file-sharing systems like Napster. However, the scalability and robustness of these systems make them appealing to a wide range of applications. This article introduces P-Ring, a new peer-to-peer index structure. P-Ring is fully distributed, fault tolerant, and provides load balancing and logarithmic search performance while supporting both equality and range queries. Our theoretical analysis as well as experimental results, obtained both in a simulated environment and on PlanetLab, show the performance of our system.