LDHT: Locality-aware Distributed Hash Tables

As the substrate of structured peer-to-peer systems, distributed hash table (DHT) plays a key role in P2P routing infrastructures. Traditional DHT does not consider the location of the nodes for the assignment of identifiers, which will result in high end-to-end latency on DHT-based overlay networks. In this paper, we propose a design of locality-aware DHT called LDHT, which exploits network locality on DHT-based systems. Instead of assigning uniform random node identifiers in traditional DHT, nodes in LDHT are assigned locality-aware identifiers according to their autonomous system numbers (ASNs). As a result, each node will have more nearby neighbors than faraway neighbors in the overlay. We evaluate the performance of LDHT on different kinds of typical DHT protocols and on various topologies. The results show that LDHT improves the traditional DHT protocols a lot in terms of end-to-end latency, without introducing additional overhead. It is indicated that LDHT is fit for different kinds of DHT protocols and can work effectively on all structured P2P systems including Chord, Symphony and Kademlia.