Optimizing Energy Consumption of Mobile Nodes in Heterogeneous Kademlia-Based Distributed Hash Tables

This paper presents a novel mechanism that enables mobile devices to efficiently participate in Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs). By selectively dropping messages, we can significantly reduce traffic and thus the energy consumption of mobile nodes with only minor performance degradation. The protocol extension preserves compatibility with existing widely used DHT systems. We evaluate the solution by measuring the energy-consumption of mobile phones participating in the Kademlia-based Mainline BitTorrent DHT, which consists of over one million nodes. We further analyze the impact of our mechanism on the performance of the DHT by means of an analytical model.