Modern networking applications replicate data and services widely, leading to a need for location-independent routing the ability to route queries directly to objects using names 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 efficiently achieved for certain network topologies. To do this, we present a new distributed algorithm that can solve the nearest-neighbor problem for these networks. We describe our solution in the context of Tapestry, an overlay network infrastructure that employs techniques proposed by Plaxton, Rajaraman, and Richa.
I will also present a non-dynamic object location algorithm with low stretch in general networks. This algorithm is reminiscent of Bourgain's embedding of general metrics into Euclidean space.
This is joint work with John Kubiatowicz, Satish Rao, and Ben Y. Zhao.