Notes on DHTs

From Ggl's wiki

Many concepts in computer science are far from being new. Many language concepts comes from the late 50's, algorithm from the 60's, operating system concepts from the late 60's and the 70's, distributed computing and programming paradigms from the early 80's. However lot a the research in the last years focused on peer to peer systems. Because they take advantage of the grow of servers and desktop system to provide availability and scalability, they are a promising topic. In order to provide true decentralized architecture with localized state and data, DHTs provide today one of the main data structures and algorithms to implement peer to peer systems.

We should begin by splitting the concepts in several layers. when we heard DHT and peer to peer, we may think about file sharing. File sharing is a service. Peer to peer is an architecture. then you need to locate peer, to communicate and interact with them.

Finding a node that holds a key is the main role of DHT. Communication is done through the network and one might choose the transport protocol according to the type of exchange. Interaction is basically RPC, a peer asks something to another which replies.