Concurrent deterministic 1–2 skip list in distributed message passing systems

Abstract

Distributed systems such as the peer-to-peer and the content management systems have to deal with large volume of data stored in several participating nodes. In a distributed environment, concurrent node joins and node leaves impose new design challenges to effectively manage the structure of the system. Deterministic 1–2 skip list is an efficient structure to manage the topology of an overlay network. However, the existing works on distributed deterministic 1–2 skip list [(S. Mandal, S. Chakraborty, and S. Karmakar, Deterministic 1–2 skip list in distributed system. in Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Parallel Distributed and Grid Computing, IEEE, 2012, pp. 296–301.)] in a decentralised environment do not support concurrency, where multiple parallel join and leave operations may be executed simultaneously. This paper presents a set of algorithms for achieving concurrency in a distributed deterministic 1–2 skip list. The properties and the correctness of the proposed algorithms are analysed theoretically. The proposed set of distributed algorithms for search, join and leave operations has message complexity similar to the centralised versions of the algorithms.