Symphony: Distributed Hashing in a Small World

We present Symphony, a novel protocol for maintaining distributed hash tables in a wide area network. The key idea is to arrange all participants along a ring and equip them with long distance contacts drawn from a family of harmonic distributions. Through simulation, we demonstrate that our construction is scalable, flexible, stable in the presence of frequent updates and offers small average latency with only a handful of long distance links per node. The cost of updates when hosts join and leave is small.