To the memory of my father,

ii Data Distribution Management (DDM) deals with two basic problems: how to distribute data generated at the application layer among underlying nodes in a distributed system and how to retrieve data back whenever it is necessary. This thesis explores DDM in two different network environments: peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks and cluster-based network environments. DDM in P2P overlay networks is considered a more complete con-cept of building and maintaining a P2P overlay architecture than a simple data fetching scheme, and is closely related to the more commonly known associative searching or queries. DDM in the cluster-based network environment is one of the important services provided by the simulation middle-ware to support real-time distributed interactive sim-ulations. The only common feature shared by DDM in both environments is that they are all built to provide data indexing service. Because of these fundamental differences, we have designed and developed a novel distributed data structure, Hierarchically Dis-tributed Tree (HD Tree), to support range queries in P2P overlay networks. All the rel