US Patent 8145736 Fast distributed object lookup for a computer network

A system and method related for performing lookup operations for objects distributed among different nodes in a peer-to-peer network are disclosed. Various nodes in the peer-to-peer network may store objects. Objects stored on a given node may be accessed by other nodes in the peer-to-peer network. To access an object, a node may first perform a lookup operation to determine where the object is stored, i.e., to determine which node in the peer-to-peer network stores the object. The peer-to-peer network may utilize a method to improve the performance of object lookup operations. In one embodiment, the method may allow object lookup operations to be performed with a latency on the order of one hop.