Enriching Kademlia by Partitioning | Protocol Labs Research
Enriching Kademlia by partitioning
DINPS 22 / 2022.07.10 / Bologna, Italy
João Monteiro, Pedro Ákos Costa, João Leitão, Alfonso de la Rocha, Yiannis Psaras
Distributed systems, Networking
Abstract
Decentralizing the Web is becoming an increasingly interesting endeavor that aims at improving user security and privacy as well as providing guaranteed ownership of content. One such endeavor that pushes towards this reality is Protocol Labs’ Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) network, which provides a decentralized large scale file system to support the decentralized Web. To achieve this, the IPFS network leverages the Kademlia DHT to route and store pointers to content stored by network members (i.e., peers). However, due to the large number of network peers, content, and accesses, the DHT routing needs to be efficient and quick to enable a decentralized web that is competitive.
In this paper, we present work in progress that aims at improving the Kademlia DHT performance through the manipulation of DHT identifiers by adding prefixes to identifiers. With this, we are able to bias the DHT topological organization towards locality (which can be either geographical or applicational), creating partitions in the DHT and enabling faster and more efficient query resolution on local content. We designed prototypes that implement our proposal and performed a first evaluation of our work in an emulated network testbed composed of 5000 nodes. Our results show that our proposal can benefit the DHT look up on data with locality with minimal overhead.