Distributed deterministic 1–2 skip list for peer-to-peer system

Abstract

Data management in the peer-to-peer system is a challenging task due to the random distribution of data among several participating peers. Efficient data structures like distributed hash tables (DHT) and its variants are designed and implemented to reduce the complexity of data management in such environment. However, DHT has its limitations in supporting range queries and its variants like distributed segment trees often perform poorly when the number of peers is high. Further, distributed lists and distributed balanced trees require significant amount of time for stabilizing after a new peer joins or a peer leaves. In this paper, a new distributed data structure called deterministic 1–2 skip list is introduced as an alternate solution for data management in the peer-to-peer systems. A deterministic skip list can be viewed as an alternate of a balanced tree, where the semantic locality of each key is preserved. Thus it can support the range queries as well as the single shot queries. This paper proposes three main operations on this data structure - searching data based on keys, insertion when a new peer joins, and deletion when a peer leaves. The correctness of the proposed operations are analyzed using theoretical arguments and mathematical proofs. The proposed scheme is simulated using NS-2.34 network simulator, and the efficiency of the scheme has been compared with DHT, DST, distributed list and distributed tree based data management.