Improving Chord Network Performance Using Geographic Coordinates

Abstract

Structured peer-to-peer overlay networks such as Chord, CAN, Tapestry, and Pastry, operate as distributed hash tables (DHTs). However, since every node is assigned a unique identifier in the basic design of DHT (randomly hashed), ”locality-awareness” is not inherent due to the topology mismatching between the P2P overlay network and the physical underlying network. In this paper, we propose to incorporate physical locality into a Chord system. To potentially benefit from some level of knowledge about the relative proximity between peers, a network positioning model is necessary for capturing physical location information of network nodes. Thus, we incorporate GNP (Global Network Positioning) into Chord (Chord-GNP) since peers can easily maintain geometric coordinates that characterize their locations in the Internet. Next, we identify and explore three factors affecting Chord-GNP performance: distance between peers, message timeout calculation and lookup latency. The measured results show that Chord-GNP efficiently locates the nearest available node providing a locality property. In addition, both the number of the messages necessary to maintain routing information and the time taken to retrieve data in Chord-GNP is less than that in Chord.