RCT: A distributed tree for supporting efficient range and multi-attribute queries in grid computing

Resource discovery is of great importance in grid environments. Most of existing approaches treat all resources equally without any categorizing mechanism. We propose, Resource Category Tree (RCT), which organizes resources based on their characteristics represented by primary attributes (PA). RCT adopts a structure of distributed AVL tree, with each node representing a specific range of PA values. Though RCT adopts a hierarchical structure, it does not require nodes in higher levels maintain more information than those in lower levels, which makes RCT highly scalable. RCT is featured by self-organization, load-aware self-adaptation and fault tolerance. Based on RCT, commonly used queries, such as range queries and multi-attribute queries, are well supported. We conduct performance evaluations through comprehensive simulations.