Hash tables - which map "keys" onto "values" - are an essential building block in modern software systems. We believe a similar functionality would be equally valuable to large distributed systems. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a Content-Addressable Network (CAN) as a distributed infrastructure that provides hash table-like functionality on Internet-like scales. The CAN is scalable, fault-tolerant and completely self-organizing, and we demonstrate its scalability, robustness and low-latency properties through simulation.
['Sylvia Ratnasamy', 'Paul Francis', 'Mark Handley', 'Richard M. Karp', 'Scott Shenker']
A scalable content-addressable network