On the fundamental tradeoffs between routing table size and network diameter in peer-to-peer networks

We study a fundamental tradeoff issue in designing a distributed hash table (DHT) in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks: the size of the routing table versus the network diameter. Observing that existing DHT schemes have either 1) a routing table size and network diameter both of O(log/sub 2/n), or 2) a routing table of size d and network diameter of O(n/sup 1/d/), S. Ratnasamy et al. (2001) asked whether this represents the best asymptotic "state-efficiency" tradeoffs. We show that some straightforward routing algorithms achieve better asymptotic tradeoffs. However, such algorithms all cause severe congestion on certain network nodes, which is undesirable in a P2P network. We rigorously define the notion of "congestion" and conjecture that the above tradeoffs are asymptotically optimal for a congestion-free network. The answer to this conjecture is negative in the strict sense. However, it becomes positive if the routing algorithm is required to eliminate congestion in a "natural" way by being uniform. We also prove that the tradeoffs are asymptotically optimal for uniform algorithms. Furthermore, for uniform algorithms, we find that the routing table size of O(log/sub 2/n) is a magic threshold point that separates two different "state-efficiency" regions. Our third result is to study the exact (instead of asymptotic) optimal tradeoffs for uniform algorithms. We propose a new routing algorithm that reduces the routing table size and the network diameter of Chord both by 21.4% without introducing any other protocol overhead, based on a novel number-theory technique. Our final result is to present Ulysses, a congestion-free nonuniform algorithm that achieves a better asymptotic "state-efficiency" tradeoff than existing schemes in the probabilistic sense, even under dynamic node joins/leaves.