Squid: Enabling search in DHT-based systems

A fundamental problem in large scale, decentralized distributed systems is the efficient discovery of information. This paper presents Squid, a peer-to-peer information discovery system that supports flexible searches and provides search guarantees. The fundamental concept underlying the approach is the definition of multi-dimensional information spaces and the maintenance of locality in these spaces. The key innovation is a dimensionality reducing indexing scheme that effectively maps the multi-dimensional information space to physical peers while preserving lexical locality. Squid supports complex queries containing partial keywords, wildcards and ranges. Analytical and simulation results show that Squid is scalable and efficient.