Probabilistic location and routing

We propose probabilistic location to enhance the performance of existing peer-to-peer location mechanisms in the case where a replica for the queried data item exists close to the query source. We introduce the attenuated Bloom filter, a lossy distributed index data structure. We describe how to use these data structures for document location and how to maintain them despite document motion. We include a detailed performance study which indicates that our algorithm performs as desired, both finding closer replicas and finding them faster than deterministic algorithms alone.