Evaluating Connection Resilience for the Overlay Network Kademlia

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the resilience of Kademlia overlay networks by simulating various configurations to assess how network parameters influence connectivity and robustness against node failures and attacks.

Contribution

It provides a detailed simulation-based analysis of Kademlia's network connectivity and resilience, highlighting how different parameters affect its fault tolerance.

Findings

Higher network connectivity improves resilience against node failures.

Parameter variations significantly influence the number of node-disjoint paths.

Kademlia's redundancy enhances its robustness in decentralized environments.

Abstract

Kademlia is a decentralized overlay network, up to now mainly used for highly scalable file sharing applications. Due to its distributed nature, it is free from single points of failure. Communication can happen over redundant network paths, which makes information distribution with Kademlia resilient against failing nodes and attacks. This makes it applicable to more scenarios than Internet file sharing. In this paper, we simulate Kademlia networks with varying parameters and analyze the number of node-disjoint paths in the network, and thereby the network connectivity. A high network connectivity is required for communication and system-wide adaptation even when some nodes or communication channels fail or get compromised by an attacker. With our results, we show the influence of these parameters on the connectivity and, therefore, the resilience against failing nodes and communication channels.