Using bidirectional links to improve peer-to-peer lookup performance

Efficient lookup is essential for peer-to-peer networks and Chord is a representative peer-to-peer lookup scheme based on distributed hash table (DHT). In peer-to-peer networks, each node maintains several unidirectional application layer links to other nodes and forwards lookup messages through such links. This paper proposes use of bidirectional links to improve the lookup performance in Chord. Every original unidirectional link is replaced by a bidirectional link, and accordingly every node becomes an anti-finger of all its finger nodes. Both theoretical analyses and experimental results indicate that these anti-fingers can help improve the lookup performance greatly with very low overhead.