The P2P MultiRouter: a black box approach to run-time adaptivity for P2P DHTs

Peer-to-peer distributed hash tables (P2P DHTs) are individually built by their designers with specific performance goals in mind. However, no individual DHT can satisfy an application that requires a "best of all worlds" performance, viz., adaptive behavior at run-time. We propose the MultiRouter, a light-weight solution that provides adaptivity to the application using a DHT-independent approach. By merely making run-time choices to select from among multiple DHT protocols using simple cost functions, we show the MultiRouter is able to provide a best-of-all-DHTs run-time performance with respect to object access times and churn-resistance. In addition, the MultiRouter is not limited to any particular set of DHT implementations since the interaction occurs in a black box manner, i.e., through well-defined interfaces. We present microbenchmark and trace-driven experiments to show that if one fixes bandwidth at each node, the MultiRouter outperforms the component DHTs.