K-Chord: A Flexible Peer-to-Peer Resource Location Protocol

An important and fundamental issue in designing structured P2P systems is the tradeoff between the number of logical links and the number of hops. This paper presents K-Chord (KC), a flexible protocol based on Chord and the idea of proportional search. We conduct an in-depth study on KC. Let D denote any given number, in order to guarantee that each query can be resolved in 0(D) hops, it is necessary and sufficient to maintain Omega(D(n
^1/D
- 1)) links on each node in KC, where n is the number of nodes in the system. The performances of KC have been evaluated using both theoretical analysis and simulation.