Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Lookup Data in P2P Systems

This paper gives a brief summary of lookup operation in P2P networks. It gives an overview of why P2P networks are attractive, discusses the lookup problem, which is basically "Given data X stored in a set of dynamic nodes, how to find it". I really enjoyed reading the last section. The paper discusses talks about CAN, Chord, Kademlia, Pastry, Tapestry and Viceroy.

All these DHTs use different overlay networks (underlying topological structure). Different overlays have different complexity for lookup. Differences between DHTs include distance functions that are combination of being symmetric and unidirectional, cost of node join/failure operations when they happen frequently, network aware routing, malicious nodes etc.

I would recommend keeping this paper.

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