Embracing the Peer Next Door: Proximity in Kademlia

Abstract

At present, the probability of selecting "the peer next door"' as an overlay neighbour in Kademlia is fairly small. Prior research has been concerned with reducing the lookup latency by means of proximity neighbour and route selection, but focused on recursive routing algorithms. This work leverages location data about peers and extends Kademlia's iterative routing algorithm to reduce cross-network traffic at the level of the distributed hash table. Evaluation with real-world measurement data gives evidence that locality of traffic tends to reduce lookup latencies as well. In turn, mechanisms that aim at reducing lookup latencies do not necessarily reduce cross-network traffic to the same extent.