Ballistic Skip Graph: A Skip Graph-Style Constant-Degree Structured Overlay

Abstract

Structured overlays enable the construction of application-level networks from multiple nodes, and the decentralized searching of data in the network. One such structured overlay is the skip graph, which supports range queries. Each node in a skip graph has multi-level shortcut links. The degree of each node is O(log N) on a network with N nodes. The paper, proposes Ballistic Skip Graph, a structured overlay that reduces the degree of each node to O(1) by limiting the number of shortcut links to a randomly selected single level while supporting range queries. Because the nodes are not grouped, the proposed method requires no extensive reconfiguration of the network when nodes join or leave. An evaluation experiment confirmed that the average routing table size is confined to a small constant.