Extended Prefix Hash Trees for a Distributed Phone Book Application

摘要

Besides file sharing, IP telephony has become the most widely used peer-to-peer-based application. Software and hardware phones with built-in peer-to-peer stacks are used to enable IP telephony in closed networks on large company sites as well as in the Internet. As part of the PeerThings project1, Siemens developed a decentralized communication platform supporting video communication, voice communication, instant messaging, and so on. While decentralized communication has already been implemented in related work, providing a scalable peer-to-peer-based distributed directory for searching user entries is still an unsolved challenge. In this article we present the Extended Prefix Hash Tree algorithm that can be used to implement an indexing infrastructure supporting range queries on top of DHTs.