Leaderless Distributed Hierarchy Formation

Abstract

I present a system for robust leaderless organization of an amorphous network into hierarchical clusters. This system, which assumes that nodes are spatially embedded and can only talk to neighbors within a given radius, scales to networks of arbitrary size and converges rapidly. The amount of data stored at each node is logarithmic in the diameter of the network, and the hierarchical structure produces an addressing scheme such that there is an invertible relation between distance and address for any pair of nodes. The system adapts automatically to stopping failures, network partition, and reorganization.