Mercury: Supporting scalable multi-attribute range queries

Abstract

This paper presents the design of Mercury, a scalable protocol for supporting multi-attribute range-based searches. Mercury differs from previous range-based query systems in that it supports multiple attributes as well as performs explicit load balancing. To guarantee efficient routing and load balancing, Mercury uses novel light-weight sampling mechanisms for uniformly sampling random nodes in a highly dynamic overlay network. Our evaluation shows that Mercury is able to achieve its goals of logarithmic-hop routing and near-uniform load balancing. We also show that Mercury can be used to solve a key problem for an important class of distributed applications: distributed state maintenance for distributed games. We show that the Mercury-based solution is easy to use, and that it reduces the game's messaging overheard significantly compared to a naïve approach. Copyright 2004 ACM.