Self-Stabilizing Balancing Algorithm for Containment-Based Trees

Abstract: Containment-based trees encompass various handy structures such as B+-trees, R-trees and M-trees. They are widely used to build data indexes, range-queryable overlays, publish/subscribe systems both in centralized and distributed contexts. In addition to their versatility, their balanced shape ensures an overall satisfactory performance. Re- cently, it has been shown that their distributed implementations can be fault-resilient. However, this robustness is achieved at the cost of un-balancing the structure. While the structure remains correct in terms of searchability, its performance can be significantly decreased. In this paper, we propose a distributed self-stabilizing algorithm to balance containment-based trees.