We study greedy routing over @math nodes placed in a ring, with the between two nodes defined to be the clockwise or the absolute distance between them along the ring. Such graphs arise in the context of modeling social networks and in routing networks for peer-to-peer systems. We construct the first network over @math nodes in which greedy routing takes @math hops in the worst-case, with @math out-going links per node. Our result has the first asymptotically optimal greedy routing complexity. Previous constructions required @math hops.
We consider the problem of designing an overlay network and routing mechanism that permits finding resources efficiently in a peer-to-peer system. We argue that many existing approaches to this problem can be modeled as the construction of a random graph embedded in a metric space whose points represent resource identifiers, where the probability of a connection between two nodes depends only on the distance between them in the metric space. We study the performance of a peer-to-peer system where nodes are embedded at grid points in a simple metric space: a one-dimensional real line. We prove upper and lower bounds on the message complexity of locating particular resources in such a system, under a variety of assumptions about failures of either nodes or the connections between them. Our lower bounds in particular show that the use of inverse power-law distributions in routing, as suggested by Kleinberg [5], is close to optimal. We also give heuristics to efficiently maintain a network supporting efficient routing as nodes enter and leave the system. Finally, we give some experimental results that suggest promising directions for future work.