A self-organizing P2P architecture for indexing and searching distributed XML documents

Abstract

This paper presents X-Pastry, a peer-to-peer system that, maintaining the tree-based overlay of Pastry, exhibits enhanced functionalities thanks to the activity of ant-inspired mobile agents. The agents move the resource keys across the network, and sort them in a self-organizing fashion. The sorting ensures that discovery operations are executed in logarithmic time, and helps to improve load balancing, adaptivity and the efficient execution of range queries. X-Pastry is particularly efficient when resources are represented with hierarchical names, as in the case of XML objects, because different levels of the tree overlay are used to manage different name components. The paper presents the architecture and the ant-based algorithm of X-Pastry, and evaluates its performance when it is used to index and search a large and distributed collection of XML documents. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.