Parallel replica access extension to DHT-based P2P systems

DHT-based P2P technologies use resource location algorithms based on distributed hash tables to avoid massive message broadcasting. Moreover, they use replicas to improve the system availability. However, they do not try to use the replicas for improving the performance of the network operations. In this paper, we propose a parallel replica access extension to those DHT-based P2P technologies. The extension allows the replicas to be accessed in a parallel way in order to accelerate the operations in the P2P network. In particular, we accelerate the operations such as node joining, document insertion, and document retrieval. We implemented the extension in a P2P network simulator (i.e., Chord simulator) to verify the feasibility and correctness of the extension. The experimental results show that, while 5 replicas are used, the performance improvements on document insertion and retrieval are 193% and 341%, respectively. Moreover, the extension incurs little overhead. These prove that the extension can efficiently accelerate the operations in a DHT-based P2P network. Although the proposed extension is implemented in the Chord simulator, it can be implemented on other similar P2P networks.