CS8803D Course Reading Summaries


Paper #: 2
Title: Chord: A scalable peer-to-peer lookup service for Internet applications


Objective of the paper: 
This paper describes a scheme for managing peer-to-peer networks.  The object of the 
scheme is to have a fault - tolerant, scaleable p2p network that has fast lookups. 


Implementation: 
The authors tested Chord by implementing a file sharing application. 



Ideas, and Strengths: 

Idea:  The main idea presented in this paper is the concept of a distributed lookup 
scheme using a distributed hash table. 
Strength:  The paper is easy to understand. 

Idea:  identifiers for nodes, and data are homogeneous.  This is an important aspect
of the paper.  In this way nodes, and key values can be mapped in the same name space.

Idea: The definition of the Chord api.  The Chord api is an interface to the p2p network 
described in the paper.  It defines how key/value pairs are inserted, updated, and looked 
up in the p2p system.  In addition there are node join, and node leave operations. 

Idea:  A consequence of the distributed hashing algorithm is that not on keys, but loads 
can be distributed evenly. 


Weaknesses, and extensions: 
A large part of the paper is very theoretical.  There is little experimental evidence 
documented in the paper.