Toward an Accurate Snapshot of DHT Networks
Jie Yu, Peng Xiao, Zhoujun Li, Yuan Joseph Zhou · IEEE Communications Letters · 2010
DHTs have been widely used in designing various applications, especially P2P file sharing systems. It is crucial but difficult to get an accurate snapshot of a DHT network, since such network is serverless and peers join and depart dynamically. In this letter, we analyze and empirically verify that neither breadth-first search nor depth-first search is optimal for DHT snapshot crawling, due to uneven ID distribution of contacts in the routing table of each DHT peer. We then propose a hybrid search strategy which could both start up quickly and slow down slowly. The experiment performed on Mainline shows that this approach significantly outperforms breadth-first or depth-first search strategy.