Cyclic Routing in Structured Peer-to-Peer Networks
Dr. Dmitry G. Korzun (Petrozavodsk State University, Russia),Dr. Andrei V. Gurtov (Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), TKK, Finland)
Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) provide packet routing service in peer-to-peer overlay networks. Many valuable applications have been recently built on top of several available DHTs. However, such systems function poorly when no direct IP connectivity is available to some nodes (e.g., located behind a NAT or firewall) and in the presence of malicious or overloaded nodes dropping some, but not all, of the packets. Detecting such nodes based only on the locally available information on source node's neighbors is difficult.
We propose cyclic routing as a new approach generalizing existing ideas of single-hop look-ahead also known as "Know thy neighbor's neighbor". Cycles in a P2P network are constructed at little cost by piggybacking node IDs into forwarded packets. Cyclic routing is proved to be dependable and more reliable when IP connectivity is limited by NATs, mobile DHT nodes, or IP-layer routing issues. Cyclic routing supports secure multi-path P2P communication. Initial simulations show a performance improvement over basic P2P routing methods.
