Autonomous Load Balancing in Distributed Hash Tables Using Churn and the Sybil Attack

Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) are an integral foundation for a variety of modern internet applications. In previous work, we have shown that DHTs can also be used as a means of organizing a large number of workers to tackle large-scale computing problems in a fault tolerant context. Whether a DHT is being used for file access or distributing a large-scale computing job, a cryptographic hash function is used to assign keys for nodes and data. Ideally, these would be uniformly distributed across the available range, thus evenly distributing the nodes and tasks. However, this is rarely the case in practice and as a result, the workload can become highly unbalanced. To address this issue, there have been numerous methods proposed for load balancing DHTs, but often they are a centralized approach.In this paper, we present four methods to autonomously balance the load of DHTs: 1) induced churn; 2) random injection of Sybil Nodes; 3) neighbor injection; and 4) invitation of nodes with low workloads. Each approach is completely decentralized, requiring minimal overhead, with individual nodes making decisions based only upon local information. What makes our approach unique is that the strategies rely on using the inherent churn in a DHT or by a variation of the Sybil attack to balance the workload. We simulate the four strategies on a Chord DHT and show they significantly rebalance the workload in a DHT. The strategy of randomly injecting virtual "Sybil" nodes performed the best in terms of balance and speedup.