Geo-enhanced routing in DHT with WebRTC - Using WebRTC to build geographically aware Distributed Hash Table between browsers.

Peer-to-peer systems have earlier made it possible to do more with the networks available than the typical server-client architecture allows. In the last few years, websites have developed from very static pages to complex dynamic applications. The web continues to evolve and WebRTC introduces peer-to-peer communication to the browser and the web application we run in these browsers. The web applications can utilize this technology in different ways. This project moves a known peer-to-peer algorithm, Chord, to the browser as a proof-of-concept. Moreover, it looks into using geographical location data to enhance the routing in a Distributed Hash Table (DHT). This project investigates the how to build a peer-to-peer system between browsers and how to test the system during development and after. The project proposes to use simulation and a scaled test with real browsers to test WebRTC based peer-to-peer applications. In this project, the browsers ran within Docker containers in data centers around the world. Both simulations and tests with real browsers can be used in development as well as evaluation testing. The Docker based real browser tests were helpful in indicating bugs, however, the environment were hard to debug. The results from the evaluation tests indicate that the routing enhanced with knowledge of geographical locations gives a boost in routing performance