Distributed Hash Table (DHT)

  • Distributed system providing lookup service similar to hash table
  • It can scale to extremely large numbers of nodes to handle continual node arrivals, departures, and failures.
  • Originally developed for P2P system like BitTorrent
  • It is decentralized in nature
  • Examples
    • P2P file sharing (torrent)
    • Distributed File Systems
    • DNS
    • CDN
    • Anycast, Multicast

DHT Algorithms

  • Consistent Hashing
    • delta(k1, k2) is defined, where k1, and k2 are keys
      • for example clockwise distance on a circle from k1 to k2
  • Rendezvous Hashing
    • aka Highest random weight (HRW) hashing