Shortest-path routing in randomized DHT-based Peer-to-Peer systems

Randomized DHT-based Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems grant nodes certain flexibility in selecting their overlay neighbors, leading to irregular overlay structures but to better overall performance in terms of path latency, static resilience and local convergence. However, routing in the presence of overlay irregularity is challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel routing protocol, RASTER, that approximates shortest overlay routes between nodes in randomized DHTs. Unlike previously proposed routing protocols, RASTER encodes and aggregates routing information. Its simple bitmap-encoding scheme together with the proposed RASTER routing algorithm enable a performance edge over current overlay routing protocols. RASTER provides a forwarding overhead of merely a small constant number of bitwise operations, a routing performance close to optimal, and a better resilience to churn. RASTER also provides nodes with the flexibility to adjust the size of the maintained routing information based on their storage/processing capabilities. The cost of storing and exchanging encoded routing information is manageable and grows logarithmically with the number of nodes in the system.