A Scalable Content-Addressable Network
Sylvia Ratnasamy, Paul Francis, Mark Handley, Richard Karp, Scott Shenker
Hash tables – which map “keys” onto “values” – are an essential building block in modern software systems. We believe a similar functionality would be equally valuable to large distributed systems. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a Content-Addressable Network (CAN) as a distributed infrastructure that provides hash table-like functionality on Internet-like scales. The CAN is scalable, fault-tolerant and completely self-organizing, and we demonstrate its scalability, robustness and low-latency properties through simulation.
- Some of the graphs were not very clear since the axis didn't have the same starting values or scaling factors.
- It was important that the authors tried different topologies on the simulated network since it is needed in order to validate the model.
- Discussed design details such as why they chose to use a torus or how the space can be divided infinitely as new nodes are joined.
- Very interesting to see how the internet and file sharing has changed since this paper. Peer to peer networks are common and exist in many different forms.