Adaptive Load Balancing for DHT Lookups

In the past few years, several DHT-based abstractions for peer-to-peer systems have been proposed. The main characteristic is to associate nodes (peers) with objects (keys) and to construct distributed routing structures to support efficient location. These approaches partially consider the load problem by balancing storage of objects without, however, considering lookup traffic. In this paper we present an analysis of structured peer-to-peer systems taking into consideration Zipf-like requests distribution. Based on our analysis, we propose a novel approach for load balancing taking into account object popularity. It is based on dynamic routing table reorganization in order to balance the routing load and on caching objects to balance the request load. We can therefore significantly improve the load balancing of traffic in these systems, and consequently their scalability and performance. Results from experimental evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.