The circular DHT provides a very elegant solution for reducing the amount of overlay information each peer must manage. Particularly, each peer is only aware of two peers, its immediate successor and its immediate predecessor. (By default, the peer is aware of its predecessor, since the predecessor is sending it messages.) But this solution introduces yet a new problem. Although each peer is only aware of two neighboring peers, to find the node responsible for a key (in the worst-case), all N nodes in the DHT will have to forward a message around the circle; NI2 messages are sent on average.