Abstract
In many distributed applications, each participating node can be characterized by one single set of attributes. The problem is to support complex queries, such as range and k-nearest-neighbor (KNN) queries, on this set of multidimensional attributes. Traditional peer-to-peer (P2P) systems either adopt an unstructured interconnection and use flooding to search for matching nodes, or implement a distributed hash table (DHT) to serve as a directory for indexing the attributes. The former suffers from excessive flooding traffic, while the latter has the overhead of updating and maintaining the directory. This paper introduces an attribute-based P2P interconnection strategy that uses the attributes to interconnect the peers instead of hash keys. Under the condition that each node is characterized by one set of attributes, the attribute-based networks can support range and KNN queries, guarantee lookup efficiency, and eliminate the need to maintain a directory. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.