The hybrid chord protocol:: A peer-to-peer lookup service for context-aware mobile applications

A fundamental problem in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay networks is how to efficiently find a node that shares a requested object. The Chord protocol is a distributed lookup protocol addressing this problem using hash keys to identify the nodes in the network and also the shared objects. However, when a node joins or leaves the Chord ring, object references have to be rearranged in order to maintain the hash key mapping rules. This leads to a heavy traffic load, especially when nodes stay in the Chord ring only for a short time. In mobile scenarios storage capacity, transmission data rate and battery power are limited resources, so the heavy traffic load generated by the shifting of object references can lead to severe problems when using Chord in a mobile scenario. In this paper, we present the Hybrid Chord Protocol (HCP). HCP solves the problem of frequent joins and leaves of nodes. As a further improvement of an efficient search, HCP supports the grouping of shared objects in interest groups. Our concept of using information profiles to describe shared objects allows defining special interest groups (context spaces) and a shared object to be available in multiple context spaces.