Multifaceted simultaneous load balancing in DHT-based P2P systems: A new game with old balls and bins

This paper presents and evaluates uncoordinated on-line algorithms for simultaneous storage and replication load-balancing in DHT-based peer-to-peer systems. We compare our approach with the classical balls into bins model, and point out both the similarities as well as the differences which call for new load-balancing mechanisms specifically targeted at P2P systems. Some of the peculiarities of P2P systems, which make our problem challenging are that both the network membership and the data indexed in the network are dynamic, there is neither global coordination nor global information to rely on, and the load-balancing mechanism ideally should not compromise the structural properties and thus the search efficiency of the DHT, while preserving the semantic information of the data (e.g., lexicographic ordering to enable range searches).