A hierarchical approach to resource awareness in DHTs for mobile data management

Data is increasingly distributed across heterogeneous networks of mobile nodes such as distributed smartphone applications, where nodes’ access to resources such as battery power, connectivity, or computing power varies, but must still be reliably collected, stored, and retrieved. In this paper, we present a scalable, location aware, hierarchical DHT that utilizes nodes’ varying resource availability levels to increase the mobile network’s data storage and retrieval capabilities. We compare this hierarchical DHT to other location aware flat and hierarchical approaches, examining the structures’ suitability for nodes with varying resource availability, and examine the effects of varying numbers of hierarchy levels.