A Scalable and Robust DHT Protocol for Structured P2P Network

Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) were originated from the design of structured peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. A DHT provides a key-based lookup service similar to a hash table. In this paper, we present the detailed design of a new DHT protocol, Tambour. The novelty of the protocol is that it uses parallel lookup to reduce retrive latency and bounds communication overhead to a dynamically adjusted routing table. Tambour estimates the probabilities of routing entries’ liveness based on statistics of node lifetime history and evicts dead entries after lookup failures. When the network is unstable, more routing entries will be evicted in a given period of time, and the routing tables will be getting smaller which minimize the number of timeouts for later lookup requests. An exprimental prototype of Tambour has been simulated and compared against two popular DHT protocols. Results show that Tambour outperforms the compared systems in terms of bandwith cost, lookup latency and the overall efficiency.