Distributed Hash Table - History

History

DT research was originally motivated, in part, by peer-to-peer systems such as Freenet, gnutella, and Napster, which took advantage of resources distributed across the Internet to provide a single useful application. In particular, they took advantage of increased bandwidth and hard disk capacity to provide a file-sharing service.

These systems differed in how they found the data their peers contained:

• Napster, the first large-scale P2P content delivery system to exist, had a central index server: each node, upon joining, would send a list of locally held files to the server, which would perform searches and refer the querier to the nodes that held the results. This central component left the system vulnerable to attacks and lawsuits.
• Gnutella and similar networks moved to a flooding query model—in essence, each search would result in a message being broadcast to every other machine in the network. While avoiding a single point of failure, this method was significantly less efficient than Napster.
• Finally, Freenet is fully distributed, but employs a heuristic key-based routing in which each file is associated with a key, and files with similar keys tend to cluster on a similar set of nodes. Queries are likely to be routed through the network to such a cluster without needing to visit many peers. However, Freenet does not guarantee that data will be found.

Distributed hash tables use a more structured key-based routing in order to attain both the decentralization of Freenet and gnutella, and the efficiency and guaranteed results of Napster. One drawback is that, like Freenet, DHTs only directly support exact-match search, rather than keyword search, although Freenet's routing algorithm can be generalized to any key type where a closeness operation can be defined.

In 2001, four systems—CAN, Chord, Pastry, and Tapestry—ignited DHTs as a popular research topic, and this area of research remains active. Outside academia, DHT technology has been adopted as a component of BitTorrent and in the Coral Content Distribution Network.