Towards Global State Identification of Nodes in DHT Based Systems

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems receive growing acceptance, and the need of identifying the states of nodes appears increasingly in a variety of P2P based applications. In this paper, we propose Hermes, an algorithm to efficiently spread and maintain the states of all nodes in large scale systems. Hermes uses an improved push & pull style gossip process to spread the states of all nodes, and proposes a novel synopsis technique to maintain the states of all nodes locally at each node. Simulation results show that, in a N-node network with commonly accepted configurations, Hermes is 2 rounds faster than push & pull style gossip to spread the state of one node to the whole network; each node only needs to store a very small part of global state data to maintain the whole view of all nodes states in the network, which is updated dynamically with high accuracy.