Scalable Source Routing

The common knowledge about the ring structure enables nodes to route packets without knowing the topology of the underlying physical network.

Packets travel along the ring so that they decrease the virtual distance to the destination (that is, the absolute difference of the addresses).

The finger table in Chord, which provides shortcuts in the virtual ring, is replaced by a route cache.

This technique facilitates the usage of fixed size route caches, which limits the per-node state and makes SSR a viable option for low memory environments.

This reduces the overhead to having an overlay protocol on top of a traditional routing protocol and greatly expedites lookup operations in MANETs which otherwise would rely on flooding,[3][4] provided the application supports (or is modified to support) key-based routing.

The provided DHT functionality also can be used to implement scalable network services in the absence of servers.

The node also sends a "neighbor notification" message to its assumed successor, to join the virtual ring.