An efficient reactive model for resource discovery in DHT-based peer-to-peer networks
J. A. M. Salter · Surrey Research Insight Open Access (The University of Surrey) · 2006
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have become prevalent recently, thanks in large part to the publicity surrounding file-sharing networks, but P2P is evolving to encompass a wide-ranging set of applications. For many of these, a resource discovery mechanism is an essential basic service, but the properties of P2P networks make provision of this a non-trivial task. Solutions proposed have included central indexes, flooding and message forwarding, but the most promising appears to be the use of Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs). DHTs have been used to provide data lookup within logarithmic message costs whilst only requiring maintenance of limited amounts of routing state. One of the most widely known DHTs is Chord, which provides lookup in typically O(log n) hops across the network, where n is the number of nodes in the structure. Understanding that this message cost is proportional to the network size, our contribution is ROME (Reactive Overlay Monitoring and Expansion), a set of processes which run on top of the Chord DHT to provide control over network size. Every node acts as an