Kadabra: Adapting Kademlia for the Decentralized Web

TL;DR

Kadabra is a novel decentralized protocol that enhances Kademlia's routing table computation, significantly reducing lookup latencies in peer-to-peer storage networks for the decentralized web.

Contribution

It introduces a bandit-based adaptive method for Kademlia routing, improving lookup efficiency in dynamic and heterogeneous networks.

Findings

Achieves 15-50% lower lookup latencies

Adapts to network heterogeneity and dynamism

Improves data retrieval speed in decentralized storage

Abstract

Blockchains have become the catalyst for a growing movement to create a more decentralized Internet. A fundamental operation of applications in a decentralized Internet is data storage and retrieval. As today's blockchains are limited in their storage functionalities, in recent years a number of peer-to-peer data storage networks have emerged based on the Kademlia distributed hash table protocol. However, existing Kademlia implementations are not efficient enough to support fast data storage and retrieval operations necessary for (decentralized) Web applications. In this paper, we present Kadabra, a decentralized protocol for computing the routing table entries in Kademlia to accelerate lookups. Kadabra is motivated by the multi-armed bandit problem, and can automatically adapt to heterogeneity and dynamism in the network. Experimental results show Kadabra achieving between 15-50% lower lookup latencies compared to state-of-the-art baselines.