A global view of kad

Distributed hash tables (DHTs) have been actively studied in literature and many different proposals have been made on how to organize peers in a DHT. However, very few DHTs have been implemented in real systems and deployed on a large scale. One exception is kad, a DHT based on Kademlia, which is part of eDonkey2000, a peer-to-peer file sharing system with several million simultaneous users. We have been crawling kad continuously for about six months and obtained information about the total number of peers online and their geographical distribution. Peers are identified by the so called kad ID, which was up to now assumed to remain the same across sessions. However, we observed that this is not the case: There is a large number of peers, in particular in China, that change their kad ID, sometimes as frequently as after each session. This change of kad IDs makes it difficult to characterize end-user availability or membership turnover. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3 [INFORM...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: IMC
• Authors: Moritz Steiner, Taoufik En-Najjary, Ernst W. Biersack
• Keywords: Distributed Hash Table, IMC 2007, Internet Technology, Kad Ids, Peer-to-peer file Sharing