Shades: Expediting Kademlia’s lookup process

Kademlia is considered to be one of the most effective key based routing protocols. It is nowadays implemented in many file sharing peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent, KAD, and Gnutella. This paper introduces Shades, a combined routing/caching scheme that significantly shortens the average lookup process in Kademlia and improves its load handling. The paper also includes an extensive performance study demonstrating the benefits of Shades and compares it to other suggested alternatives using both synthetic workloads and traces from YouTube and Wikipedia.