RC-Chord: Resource clustering in a large-scale hierarchical peer-to-peer system

Conducting data fusion and Command and Control (C2) in large-scale systems requires more than the presently available Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies provide. Resource Clustered Chord (RC-Chord) is an extension to the Chord protocol that incorporates elements of a hierarchical peer-to-peer architecture to facilitate coalition formation algorithms in large-scale systems. Each cluster in this hierarchy represents a particular resource available for allocation, and RC-Chord provides the capabilities to locate agents of a particular resource. This approach improves upon other strategies by including support for abundant resources, or those resources that most or all agents in the system possess. This scenario exists in large-scale coalition formation problems, and applies directly to the United States Air Force's CyberCraft project. Simulations demonstrate that RC-Chord scales to systems of one million or more agents, and can be adapted to serve as a deployment environment for CyberCraft.