Continuous Timestamping for Efficient Replication Management in DHTs

Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) provide an efficient solution for data location and lookup in large-scale P2P systems. However, it is up to the applications to deal with the availability of the data they store in the DHT, e.g. via replication. To improve data availability, most DHT applications rely on data replication. However, efficient replication management is quite challenging, in particular because of concurrent and missed updates. In this paper, we propose an efficient solution to data replication in DHTs. We propose a new service, called Continuous Timestamp based Replication Management (CTRM), which deals with the efficient storage, retrieval and updating of replicas in DHTs. To perform updates on replicas, we propose a new protocol that stamps update actions with timestamps generated in a distributed fashion. Timestamps are not only monotonically increasing but also continuous, i.e. without gap. The property of monotonically increasing allows applications to determine a total order on updates. The other property, i.e. continuity, enables applications to deal with missed updates. We evaluated the performance of our solution through simulation and experimentation. The results show its effectiveness for replication management in DHTs.