Butterflies and peer-to-peer networks

Abstract

Research in Peer-to-peer systems has focussed on building efficient Content Addressable Networks (CANs), which are essentially distributed hash tables (DHT) that support location of resources based on unique keys. While most proposed schemes are robust to a large number of random faults, there are very few schemes that are robust to a large number of adversarial faults. In a recent paper ([2]) Fiat and Saia have proposed such a solution that is robust to adversarial faults. We propose a new solution based on multi-butterflies that improves upon the previous solution by Fiat and Saia. Our new network, multi-hypercube, is a fault tolerant version of the hypercube, and may find applications to other problems as well. We also demonstrate how this network can be maintained dynamically. This addresses the first open problem in the paper ([2]) by Fiat and Saia.