Analysis of Path Convergence in Chord DHT

Abstract

Chord is a Distributed Hash Table widely used for its efficiency in searching for information. The efficiency of this structure relies on creating short paths of O(log₂ n) between two nodes, in which n is the number of nodes. To enhance efficiency, several studies use replication in the nodes belonging to the network, assuming that searches will converge in these replicated nodes. This work proposes a convergence formula and analyzes the number of searches converging on nodes for different network sizes (small, medium, and large), up to one million nodes. The experiments show that the convergence creates three zones and the results support the replication techniques from previous studies and demonstrate that it is feasible to replicate in nodes that were not considered in these studies.