Design and scalability of NLS, a scalable naming and location service

This paper sketches the design of NLS, a scalable naming and location service, and presents an analysis and evaluation of its scalability. NLS resolves textual names to a nearby instance of a set of replicated objects associated with that name, and is designed to scale to the dimensions of a world-wide service. Applications include resolving Web URIs (uniform resource identifiers) to the nearest cached or replicated objects that provide the associated content. The key design goals of NLS are scalability, performance, availability and ease of administration. NLS is based on a dynamically configured, distributed search tree, with a fat-tree based topology at the global layer and spanning trees at the local layer. Analysis and preliminary empirical results obtained with a prototype implementation indicate that the system scales as expected.