Meridian: A Lightweight Network Location Service withoutVirtual Coordinates

1. INTRODUCTIONSelecting nodes based on their location in the network is a basic building block for many distributed systems. In small systems,it is possible to perform extensive measurements and make decisions based on global information. For instance, in an onlinegame with few servers, a client can simply measure its latency to all servers and bind to the closest one for minimal responsetime. However, collecting global information is infeasible for a significant set of recently emerging large-scale distributed applica-tions, where global information is unwieldy and lack of centralized servers makes it difficult to find nodes that fit selection criteria. Yetmany distributed applications, such as filesharing networks, content distribution networks, backup systems, anonymous communicationnetworks, pub-sub systems, discovery services, and multi-player online games could benefit substantially from selecting nodes basedon their location in the network