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USITS '03 Abstract

A Study of the Performance Potential of DHT-based Overlays

Sushant Jain, Ratul Mahajan, and David Wetherall, University of Washington

Abstract

We use simulation to study whether overlays based on the recent distributed hash tables (DHTs) have the potential to deliver performance comparable to that of overlays based on measurements. Our work is motivated by the use of DHTs for services such as multicast, which is already targeted by measurement-based overlays; there is currently little understanding of how the two approaches compare at scales where both are viable.

We compare three DHT-based overlays (CAN, Chord, and Pastry) with two measurement-based overlays (Narada and NICE), as well as power-law random graphs (PLRGs) that represent Gnutella. To enable comparison, we configure the overlays with the same average out-degree and focus on moderate scale. To gauge potential, we look at current and idealized DHT algorithms. We find that basic versions of DHTs have a latency stretch that is at least twice that of NICE and Narada, but similar performance in terms of bandwidth hotspots. However, DHT performance can be improved considerably with routing heuristics and topology-aware overlay construction, which have the potential to bring DHT performance at par with NICE. We also report on the performance of overlays with power-law structure and the impact of hierarchy on performance.

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Last changed: 10 Nov. 2003 jel
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