Enabling routing control in a DHT

DHTs are scalable, self-organizing, and adaptive to underlying topology changes, thus being a promising infrastructure for realizing autonomic communications in distributed systems. To provide the above advantages, however, DHTs sacrifice flexibility, that is, all messages are routed by using a common algorithm in a DHT on the assumption that all participant nodes are homogeneous. In practice, nodes in large-scale systems might be heterogeneous with respect to their capabilities, reputations, affiliations of administrative domains, and so on, which consequently makes it preferable to distinguish the heterogeneity of participant nodes and enable flexible control of routing destinations and paths. To achieve this, in this paper we propose a novel approach that supports organizing nodes into groups and enables routing control in a DHT. The effectiveness of our proposals is demonstrated through theoretical analysis and extensive simulations.