Querical Data Networks

Recently, a family of massive self-organizing data networks has emerged. These networks mainly serve as large-scale distributed query-processing systems. We term these networks querical data networks (QDN). A QDN is a federation of a dynamic set of peer, autonomous nodes communicating through a transient-form interconnection. Data is naturally distributed among the QDN nodes in extra-fine grain, where a few data items are dynamically created, collected, and/or stored at each node. Therefore, the network scales linearly to the size of the data set. With a dynamic data set, a dynamic and large set of nodes, and a transient-form communication infrastructure, QDNs should be considered as the new generation of distributed database systems with significantly less constraining assumptions as compared to their ancestors. Peer-to-peer networks (Daswani, Garcia-Molina, & Yang, 2003) and sensor networks (Akyildiz, Su, Sankarasubramaniam, & Cayirci, 2002; Estrin, Govindan, Heidemann, & Kumar, 1999) are well-known examples of QDNs.