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Schematical overview of a distributed hash table (from Wikipedia) The exact mechanism is based on the Kademlia system, as described in this paper. In the case of BitTorrent, the keys are hashes related to the torrent, and the values are the whereabouts of peers interested in the contents of that torrent. All nodes connected to the DHT store a small subset of the keys, and the DHT network automatically decides which node is responsible for storing which item. Third, it can be used to anonymously exchange data, and (as we will see) control who can see what data.Īs it turns out, it is possible to use the peer-to-peer infrastructure used by BitTorrent to reliably store and retrieve IoT sensor data.īitTorrent makes use of a so-called distributed hash table (DHT) to locate other BitTorrent nodes that want to share the same file. A DHT is basically a giant dictionary mapping keys to values, spread out over all nodes participating in the DHT network.
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Second, it is redundant (no single point of failure) and not controlled or controllable by a single entity. First of all, the infrastructure is ‘free’ (although in most peer-to-peer networks you also have to participate in storing some of the data). The Internet of Things promises to connect virtually all devices and make sensor data ubiquitously available. Instead of storing all this data in a central location, you can use a peer-to-peer network to store sensor data. Using a peer-to-peer network has several advantages.
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