Fluctuation in Peer-to-Peer Networks: Mitigating Its Effect on DHT Performance

Due to the transient nature of peers, any Peer-to-Peer network is in peril to falling apart if peers do not receive routing table updates periodically. To this end, maintenance, which affects every peer, ensures connectedness and sustained data operation performance. However, a high rate of change in peer population usually incurs lots of network maintenance messages and can severely degrade overall performance. We discuss three methods how to tackle and mitigate the effect of peer fluctuation on a tree-based distributed hash table.