Survey into basics, concepts, applications, security and simulation of DHT and applications based on DHT technologies

Distributed architectures have emerged as a significant area of computing affecting the consumer domain more and more. Distributed data transfer has proven to be a suitable and convenient technology for efficiently transferring files across multiple peers interested in obtaining an identical copy of the same data – for example entertainment or a block of application data. Current technology when discussing decentralized distributed systems are based on the Distributed Hash Table structures. For file transfer, several different implementations exists which utilize this approach and perhaps the most adopted at the moment is the BitTorrent implementation of DHT. In addition to an overlook into DHT technologies and different implementations of DHT, we cover the basic aspects of DHT security techniques. When developing applications which utilize this kind of technologies, the functionality and efficiency of the protocol cannot be trivially defined. This is because the network and humane operating environment in which the system is eventually in use shall have many variance factors which affect the effectiveness and usability of the protocol or implementation. Therefore we also iterate some possibilities which exists to simulate DHT operation and enable for researchers to come up with test beds in order to determine how changes in their algorithms would impact all participants should the changes be taken into use