Recursive or iterative routing? Hybrid!

In our current work with the Chord protocol [SMK01] we had to decide whether to use iterative or recursive routing. Iterative routing provides the initiating node with a lot of information and influence on the routing path. Recursive routing on the other hand is faster and results in less overhead, most notably in stable networks. We present a hybrid routing solution that inherits the advantages of both approaches without increasing the overhead or slowing down the lookup procedure.