Enhancing the Kademlia P2P network

Distributed Hash Tables (DHT's) are sophisticated Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay networks. Such overlays have the ability to retrieve stored data in a limited time, usually in a logarithmic number of steps. However in contrast to the well-known Gnutella and FastTrack networks, these can only locate data quickly, if the key associated with the data requested is accurately specified. In this article we analyze the reliability of the Kademlia network, and describe our model, which can be used to determine its system-wide configuration parameters. We also present a novel algorithm that implements broadcast messages in Kademlia. The developed algorithm ensures reliable delivery of broadcast messages in an error prone environment. Broadcast messaging is an elementary service in an overlay network. Using broadcast messages, queries of any key type or part of key, can be realized. © Periodica Polytechnica 2010.