Kaleidoscope: Adding colors to Kademlia

Kademlia is considered to be one of the most effective key based routing protocols. It is nowadays implemented in many file sharing peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent, KAD, and Gnutella. This paper introduces Kaleidoscope, a novel routing/caching scheme designed to significantly reduce the cost of lookup operations in Kademlia by using a color-based distributed cache. Moreover, Kaleidoscope greatly improves load balancing among the nodes and reduces the well documented hot spots problem. The paper also includes an extensive performance study demonstrating the benefits of Kaleidoscope.