Properties
DHTs characteristically emphasize the following properties:
- Autonomy and Decentralization: the nodes collectively form the system without any central coordination.
- Fault tolerance: the system should be reliable (in some sense) even with nodes continuously joining, leaving, and failing.
- Scalability: the system should function efficiently even with thousands or millions of nodes.
A key technique used to achieve these goals is that any one node needs to coordinate with only a few other nodes in the system – most commonly, O(log n) of the participants (see below) – so that only a limited amount of work needs to be done for each change in membership.
Some DHT designs seek to be secure against malicious participants and to allow participants to remain anonymous, though this is less common than in many other peer-to-peer (especially file sharing) systems; see anonymous P2P.
Finally, DHTs must deal with more traditional distributed systems issues such as load balancing, data integrity, and performance (in particular, ensuring that operations such as routing and data storage or retrieval complete quickly).
Read more about this topic: Distributed Hash Table
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