Load-Balancing Performance of Consistent Hashing: Asymptotic Analysis of Random Node Join

Balancing of structured peer-to-peer graphs, including their zone sizes, has recently become an important topic of distributed hash table (DHT) research. To bring analytical understanding into the various peer-join mechanisms based on consistent hashing, we study how zone-balancing decisions made during the initial sampling of the peer space affect the resulting zone sizes and derive several asymptotic bounds for the maximum and minimum zone sizes that hold with high probability. Several of our results contradict those of prior work and shed new light on the theoretical performance limitations of consistent hashing. We use simulations to verify our models and compare the performance of the various methods using the example of recently proposed de Bruijn DHTs.