Optimizing the finger tables in Chord-like DHTs

The Chord protocol is the best known example of implementation of logarithmic complexity routing for structured peer-to-peer networks. Its routing algorithm, however, does not provide an optimal trade-off between resources exploited (the size of the ‘finger table’) and performance (the average or worst-case number of hops to reach destination). Cordasco et al. showed that a finger table based on Fibonacci distances provides lower number of hops with fewer table entries. In this paper we generalize this result, showing how to construct an improved finger table when the objective is to reduce the number of hops, possibly at the expense of an increased size of the finger table. Our results can also be exploited to guarantee low routing time in case a fraction of nodes fails. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.