Reliability of data in structured peer-to-peer systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are very useful for managing large amounts of widely distributed data. For this purpose distributed hash tables (DHT) offer a highly scalable and self-organizing paradigm for efficient distribution and retrieval of data. Thereby a common assumption of P2P systems is, that the participating nodes are unreliable and may fail at any time. Since many of research goes into the design of DHT lookup services, these systems aim to provide a stable global addressing structure. But to storage data reliable in a DHT only few techniques were already developed. However since data has to be stored persistent in the network, it should be retrieved anytime, even if nodes fail. In this work we discuss possibilities to store data fault tolerant in a structured peer-to-peer system.