DHTs can locate objects in a peer-to-peer network within an efficient amount of overlay hops. Since an overlay hop is likely to consist of multiple physical hops, the ratio between the number of physical hops induced by the overlay routing process and the number of physical hops on a direct physical path is often significantly lopsided. Recently, some approaches have been suggested to optimize that ratio by building topology-aware peer-to-peer overlays. However, none of them were explicitly designed to handle node mobility.

We present an approach that optimizes the overlay vs. direct physical path ratio and maintains it even in the presence of node mobility. Thus, it is well suited for highly dynamic networks, such as ad-hoc networks.