The "Umbrella" Distributed Hash Table Protocol for Content Distribution

Abstract

The technical and ethical issues of these systems proved to be their weak point. Systems that have no central point of control and distribute functions among all users seem better fit for sharing and distributing content. A solution has been proposed in the form of distributed hashtables (DHTs). This article proposes an alternative architecture for content distribution based on a new DHT routing scheme. The proposed architecture is well structured and self-organized in such a way as to be fault-tolerant and highly efficient. It provides users with content distribution and discovery capabilities on top of an overlay network. The novelty of our proposed architecture lies in its routing table which is maintained by each node and is of constant size, as opposed to other algorithms that are proportional to the network’s size (usually O(logN)). All operations in our architecture are of O(logbN) steps (entry, publishing, and lookups) and degrade gracefully as up-to-date information of the routing table decreases due to numerous node failures.