mDHT: Multicast-Augmented DHT Architecture for High Availability and Immunity to Churn

This paper presents mDHT, a novel architectural enhancement to DHT using multicast service discovery. In mDHT, a group of host computers in a subnet participate in a DHT overlay as a single node. A query is routed from subnet to subnet until it reaches the final destination subnet, where it is resolved among the hosts using link-local multicast. Under a reasonable deployment assumption, mDHT offers many benefits over standard DHTs, such as locality, easy bootstrapping, high availability, and near imperviousness to node churn.