Pastry (DHT)

Pastry is an overlay and routing network for the implementation of a distributed hash table (DHT) similar to Chord. The key-value pairs are stored in a redundant peer-to-peer network of connected Internet hosts. The protocol is bootstrapped by supplying it with the IP address of a peer already in the network and from then on via the routing table which is dynamically built and repaired. It is claimed that because of its redundant and decentralized nature there is no single point of failure and any single node can leave the network at any time without warning and with little or no chance of data loss. The protocol is also capable of using a routing metric supplied by an outside program, such as ping or traceroute, to determine the best routes to store in its routing table.

Although the distributed hash table functionality of Pastry is almost identical to other DHTs, what sets it apart is the routing overlay network built on top of the DHT concept. This allows Pastry to realize the scalability and fault tolerance of other networks, while reducing the overall cost of routing a packet from one node to another by avoiding the need to flood packets. Because the routing metric is supplied by an external program based on the IP address of the target node, the metric can be easily switched to shortest hop count, lowest latency, highest bandwidth, or even a general combination of metrics.

The hash table's key-space is taken to be circular, like the key-space in the Chord system, and node IDs are 128-bit unsigned integers representing position in the circular key-space. Node IDs are chosen randomly and uniformly so peers who are adjacent in node ID are geographically diverse. The routing overlay network is formed on top of the hash table by each peer discovering and exchanging state information consisting of a list of leaf nodes, a neighborhood list, and a routing table. The leaf node list consists of the L/2 closest peers by node ID in each direction around the circle.

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