Ring-like DHTs and the Postage Stamp Problem

We explore Chord-like ring structures for Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) and show that the Postage Stamp Problem (PSP) is equivalent to finding optimal structures for such ring topologies. We first leverage known results for that problem to design structures for ring-like DHTs that use shortest-path routing. We then describe a variant of the PSP that corresponds to ring-like DHTs that use greedy routing and develop an algorithm that smoothly trades off between the number of finger pointers and network diameter. We include a matrix of the number of nodes that can be supported as a function of the number of finger pointers and the network diameter and also note an interesting link to the Fibonacci sequence. Finally, we see that our ring constructions can support networks of 165 million nodes compared to only 1 million nodes for Chord-like rings when both approaches use 20 finger pointers and a network diameter of 20.