Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet
Applications
Ion Stoica, Robert Morris, David Karger, M. Frans Kaashoek, Hari BalakrishnanMIT Laboratory for Computer Science
chord@lcs.mit.edu
http://pdos.lcs.mit.edu/chord/

Abstract
A fundamental problem that confronts peer-to-peer applications isto efficiently locate the node that stores a particular data item. This
paper presents Chord, a distributed lookup protocol that addresses
this problem. Chord provides support for just one operation: given
a key, it maps the key onto a node. Data location can be easily
implemented on top of Chord by associating a key with each data
item, and storing the key/data item pair at the node to which the
key maps. Chord adapts efficiently as nodes join and leave thesystem, and can answer queries even if the system is continuously
changing. Results from theoretical analysis, simulations, and experiments show that Chord is scalable, with communication cost
and the state maintained by each node scaling logarithmically with
the number of Chord nodes.

1.

Introduction

Peer-to-peer systems and applications are distributed systems
without any centralized control or hierarchical organization, where
the software running at each node is equivalent in functionality.
A review of the features of recent peer-to-peer applications yields
a long list: redundant storage, permanence, selection of nearby
servers, anonymity, search, authentication, and hierarchical naming. Despite this rich set of features, the core operation in mostpeer-to-peer systems is efficient location of data items. The contribution of this paper is a scalable protocol for lookup in a dynamic
peer-to-peer system with frequent node arrivals and departures.
The Chord protocol supports just one operation: given a key,
it maps the key onto a node. Depending on the application using
Chord, that node might be responsible for storing a value associatedwith the key. Chord uses a variant of consistent hashing [11] toassign keys to Chord nodes. Consistent hashing tends to balanceload, since each node receives roughly the same number of keys,

 University of California, Berkeley. istoica@cs.berkeley.edu

and involves relatively little movement of keys when nodes join
and leave the system.
Previous work on consistent hashing assumed that nodes were
aware of most other nodes in the system, making it impractical toscale to large number of nodes. In contrast, each Chord node needs“routing” information about only a few other nodes. Because therouting table is distributed, a node resolves the hash function bycommunicating with a few other nodes. In the steady state, in
an -node system, each node maintains information only aboutother nodes, and resolves all lookups via
messages to other nodes. Chord maintains its routing information as
nodes join and leave the system; with high probability each such
event results in no more thanmessages.
Three features that distinguish Chord from many other peer-topeer lookup protocols are its simplicity, provable correctness, andprovable performance. Chord is simple, routing a key through a sequence ofother nodes toward the destination. A Chord
node requires information aboutother nodes for efficientrouting, but performance degrades gracefully when that information is out of date. This is important in practice because nodes will
state
join and leave arbitrarily, and consistency of evenmay be hard to maintain. Only one piece information per node need
be correct in order for Chord to guarantee correct (though slow)
routing of queries; Chord has a simple algorithm for maintaining
this information in a dynamic environment.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 compares Chord to related work. Section 3 presents the system modelthat motivates the Chord protocol. Section 4 presents the base
Chord protocol and proves several of its properties, while Section 5
presents extensions to handle concurrent joins and failures. Section 6 demonstrates our claims about Chord’s performance throughsimulation and experiments on a deployed prototype. Finally, weoutline items for future work in Section 7 and summarize our contributions in Section 8.

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Authors in reverse alphabetical order.

This research was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego, under contract N66001-00-1-8933.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work forpersonal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, torepublish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specificpermission and/or a fee.
SIGCOMM’01, August 27-31, 2001, San Diego, California, USA.
Copyright 2001 ACM 1-58113-411-8/01/0008 ...$5.00.

2. Related Work
While Chord maps keys onto nodes, traditional name and location services provide a direct mapping between keys and values. A value can be an address, a document, or an arbitrary data
item. Chord can easily implement this functionality by storing eachkey/value pair at the node to which that key maps. For this reason
and to make the comparison clearer, the rest of this section assumesa Chord-based service that maps keys onto values.
DNS provides a host name to IP address mapping [15]. Chord
can provide the same service with the name representing the key
and the associated IP address representing the value. Chord requires no special servers, while DNS relies on a set of special root

servers. DNS names are structured to reflect administrative boundaries; Chord imposes no naming structure. DNS is specialized tothe task of finding named hosts or services, while Chord can also
be used to find data objects that are not tied to particular machines.
The Freenet peer-to-peer storage system [4, 5], like Chord, isdecentralized and symmetric and automatically adapts when hosts
leave and join. Freenet does not assign responsibility for documents to specific servers; instead, its lookups take the form ofsearches for cached copies. This allows Freenet to provide a degreeof anonymity, but prevents it from guaranteeing retrieval of existing
documents or from providing low bounds on retrieval costs. Chord
does not provide anonymity, but its lookup operation runs in predictable time and always results in success or definitive failure.
The Ohaha system uses a consistent hashing-like algorithm for
mapping documents to nodes, and Freenet-style query routing [18].
As a result, it shares some of the weaknesses of Freenet. Archival
Intermemory uses an off-line computed tree to map logical addresses to machines that store the data [3].
The Globe system [2] has a wide-area location service to map object identifiers to the locations of moving objects. Globe arranges
the Internet as a hierarchy of geographical, topological, or administrative domains, effectively constructing a static world-wide searchtree, much like DNS. Information about an object is stored in aparticular leaf domain, and pointer caches provide search shortcuts [22]. As pointed out by the authors, the search tree does notscale, because higher-level nodes in the tree serve large numbers ofrequests and also have high storage demands.
The distributed data location protocol developed by Plaxton etal. [19], a variant of which is used in OceanStore [12], is perhaps
the closest algorithm to the Chord protocol. It provides stronger
guarantees than Chord: like Chord it guarantees that queries makea logarithmic number hops and that keys are well balanced, but the
Plaxton protocol also ensures, subject to assumptions about network topology, that queries never travel further in network distancethan the node where the key is stored. The advantage of Chordis that it is substantially less complicated and handles concurrent
node joins and failures well. The Chord protocol is also similar to
Pastry, the location algorithm used in PAST [8]. However, Pastry
is a prefix-based routing protocol, and differs in other details from
Chord.
CAN uses a -dimensional Cartesian coordinate space (for somefixed ) to implement a distributed hash table that maps keys ontostate, and the lookup costvalues [20]. Each node maintains
is. Thus, in contrast to Chord, the state maintained by a
CAN node does not depend on the network size , but the lookup
cost increases faster than
. If
, CAN lookup times
and storage needs match Chord’s. However, CAN is not designed) varies, so this match will only occur
to vary as (and thus
for the “right”
corresponding to the fixed . CAN requires anadditional maintenance protocol to periodically remap the identifier
space onto nodes. Chord also has the advantage that its correctness
is robust in the face of partially incorrect routing information.
Chord’s routing procedure may be thought of as a onedimensional analogue of the Grid location system [14]. Grid relies
on real-world geographic location information to route its queries;
Chord maps its nodes to an artificial one-dimensional space within
which routing is carried out by an algorithm similar to Grid’s.
Chord can be used as a lookup service to implement a variety
of systems, as discussed in Section 3. In particular, it can help
avoid single points of failure or control that systems like Napster
possess [17], and the lack of scalability that systems like Gnutella
display because of their widespread use of broadcasts [10].

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3. System Model
Chord simplifies the design of peer-to-peer systems and applications based on it by addressing these difficult problems: Load balance: Chord acts as a distributed hash function,
spreading keys evenly over the nodes; this provides a degreeof natural load balance.

 Decentralization: Chord is fully distributed: no node ismore important than any other. This improves robustness andmakes Chord appropriate for loosely-organized peer-to-peer
applications.

 Scalability: The cost of a Chord lookup grows as the log of

the number of nodes, so even very large systems are feasible.
No parameter tuning is required to achieve this scaling.

 Availability: Chord automatically adjusts its internal tables
to reflect newly joined nodes as well as node failures, ensuring that, barring major failures in the underlying network, thenode responsible for a key can always be found. This is true
even if the system is in a continuous state of change.

 Flexible naming: Chord places no constraints on the struc-ture of the keys it looks up: the Chord key-space is flat. This
gives applications a large amount of flexibility in how they
map their own names to Chord keys.
The Chord software takes the form of a library to be linked withthe client and server applications that use it. The application interacts with Chord in two main ways. First, Chord provides a
lookup(key) algorithm that yields the IP address of the node
responsible for the key. Second, the Chord software on each node
notifies the application of changes in the set of keys that the nodeis responsible for. This allows the application software to, for example, move corresponding values to their new homes when a newnode joins.
The application using Chord is responsible for providing any desired authentication, caching, replication, and user-friendly namingof data. Chord’s flat key space eases the implementation of thesefeatures. For example, an application could authenticate data bystoring it under a Chord key derived from a cryptographic hash of
the data. Similarly, an application could replicate data by storing it
under two distinct Chord keys derived from the data’s applicationlevel identifier.
The following are examples of applications for which Chord
would provide a good foundation:
Cooperative Mirroring, as outlined in a recent proposal [6].
Imagine a set of software developers, each of whom wishes
to publish a distribution. Demand for each distribution mightvary dramatically, from very popular just after a new release
to relatively unpopular between releases. An efficient approach for this would be for the developers to cooperatively
mirror each others’ distributions. Ideally, the mirroring system would balance the load across all servers, replicate andcache the data, and ensure authenticity. Such a system should
be fully decentralized in the interests of reliability, and because there is no natural central administration.
Time-Shared Storage for nodes with intermittent connectivity. If
a person wishes some data to be always available, but theirmachine is only occasionally available, they can offer to store
others’ data while they are up, in return for having their datastored elsewhere when they are down. The data’s name can6File System

1successor(1) = 10
17

Block Store

Block Store

Block Store

Chord

Chord

Chord

ClientServerServer62

successor(6) = 0

5successor(2) = 3

3
42

Figure 2: An identifier circle consisting of the three nodes 0, 1,
and 3. In this example, key 1 is located at node 1, key 2 at node3, and key 6 at node 0.

Figure 1: Structure of an example Chord-based distributed
storage system.
serve as a key to identify the (live) Chord node responsible
for storing the data item at any given time. Many of thesame issues arise as in the Cooperative Mirroring application, though the focus here is on availability rather than loadbalance.
Distributed Indexes to support Gnutella- or Napster-like keyword
search. A key in this application could be derived from thedesired keywords, while values could be lists of machines
offering documents with those keywords.
Large-Scale Combinatorial Search, such as code breaking. In
this case keys are candidate solutions to the problem (such as
cryptographic keys); Chord maps these keys to the machines
responsible for testing them as solutions.
Figure 1 shows a possible three-layered software structure for acooperative mirror system. The highest layer would provide a filelike interface to users, including user-friendly naming and authentication. This “file system” layer might implement named directories
and files, mapping operations on them to lower-level block operations. The next layer, a “block storage” layer, would implement
the block operations. It would take care of storage, caching, andreplication of blocks. The block storage layer would use Chord to
identify the node responsible for storing a block, and then talk tothe block storage server on that node to read or write the block.

4.

The Base Chord Protocol

The Chord protocol specifies how to find the locations of keys,
how new nodes join the system, and how to recover from the failure(or planned departure) of existing nodes. This section describes a
simplified version of the protocol that does not handle concurrent
joins or failures. Section 5 describes enhancements to the base protocol to handle concurrent joins and failures.

4.1 Overview
At its heart, Chord provides fast distributed computation of ahash function mapping keys to nodes responsible for them. It uses
consistent hashing [11, 13], which has several good properties.
With high probability the hash function balances load (all nodes
receive roughly the same number of keys). Also with high probnode joins (or leaves) the network, only an
ability, when an
fraction of the keys are moved to a different location—
this is clearly the minimum necessary to maintain a balanced load.
Chord improves the scalability of consistent hashing by avoiding the requirement that every node know about every other node.
A Chord node needs only a small amount of “routing” information about other nodes. Because this information is distributed, a#"%$  !

node resolves the hash function by communicating with a few othernodes. In an -node network, each node maintains information
other nodes, and a lookup requires
only about
messages.
Chord must update the routing information when a node joins orleaves the network; a join or leave requires
messages.

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4.2 Consistent Hashing&

The consistent hash function assigns each node and key an -bit
identifier using a base hash function such as SHA-1 [9]. A node’s
identifier is chosen by hashing the node’s IP address, while a key
identifier is produced by hashing the key. We will use the term“key” to refer to both the original key and its image under the hashfunction, as the meaning will be clear from context. Similarly, theterm “node” will refer to both the node and its identifier under thehash function. The identifier lengthmust be large enough tomake the probability of two nodes or keys hashing to the same identifier negligible.
Consistent hashing assigns keys to nodes as follows. Identifiers. Key is assigned toare ordered in an identifier circle modulo
the first node whose identifier is equal to or follows (the identifierof) in the identifier space. This node is called the successor nodeof key , denoted by successor . If identifiers are represented as, thenis thea circle of numbers from tofirst node clockwise from .
Figure 2 shows an identifier circle with. The circle has
three nodes: 0, 1, and 3. The successor of identifier 1 is node 1, so
key 1 would be located at node 1. Similarly, key 2 would be locatedat node 3, and key 6 at node 0.
Consistent hashing is designed to let nodes enter and leave the
network with minimal disruption. To maintain the consistent hashing mapping when a node joins the network, certain keys previously assigned to ’s successor now become assigned to . Whennode leaves the network, all of its assigned keys are reassigned
to ’s successor. No other changes in assignment of keys to nodes
need occur. In the example above, if a node were to join with identifier 7, it would capture the key with identifier 6 from the nodewith identifier 0.
The following results are proven in the papers that introduced
consistent hashing [11, 13]:

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When consistent hashing is implemented as described above, thetheorem proves a bound of. The consistent hashingpaper shows that can be reduced to an arbitrarily small constantby having each node run“virtual nodes” each with its
own identifier.
The phrase “with high probability” bears some discussion. A
simple interpretation is that the nodes and keys are randomly chosen, which is plausible in a non-adversarial model of the world.
The probability distribution is then over random choices of keys
and nodes, and says that such a random choice is unlikely to produce an unbalanced distribution. One might worry, however, about
an adversary who intentionally chooses keys to all hash to the same
identifier, destroying the load balancing property. The consistenthashing paper uses “ -universal hash functions” to provide certain
guarantees even in the case of nonrandom keys.
Rather than using a -universal hash function, we chose to use
the standard SHA-1 function as our base hash function. This makes
our protocol deterministic, so that the claims of “high probability”
no longer make sense. However, producing a set of keys that collide
under SHA-1 can be seen, in some sense, as inverting, or “decrypting” the SHA-1 function. This is believed to be hard to do. Thus,
instead of stating that our theorems hold with high probability, we
can claim that they hold “based on standard hardness assumptions.”
For simplicity (primarily of presentation), we dispense with theuse of virtual nodes. In this case, the load on a node may exceed theaverage by (at most) an
factor with high probability (orin our case, based on standard hardness assumptions). One reason
to avoid virtual nodes is that the number needed is determined by
the number of nodes in the system, which may be difficult to determine. Of course, one may choose to use an a priori upper bound on
the number of nodes in the system; for example, we could postulate
at most one Chord server per IPv4 address. In this case running 32
virtual nodes per physical node would provide good load balance.

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4.3 Scalable Key Location
A very small amount of routing information suffices to implement consistent hashing in a distributed environment. Each node
need only be aware of its successor node on the circle. Queries
for a given identifier can be passed around the circle via these successor pointers until they first encounter a node that succeeds theidentifier; this is the node the query maps to. A portion of the Chord
protocol maintains these successor pointers, thus ensuring that all
lookups are resolved correctly. However, this resolution scheme isinefficient: it may require traversing all
nodes to find the appropriate mapping. To accelerate this process, Chord maintains
additional routing information. This additional information is notessential for correctness, which is achieved as long as the successor
information is maintained correctly.
As before, let be the number of bits in the key/node identifiers.
Each node, , maintains a routing table with (at most)entries,called the finger table. The
entry in the table at node contains
the identity of the first node, , that succeeds by at leaston
the identifier circle, i.e.,, where(and all arithmetic is modulo). We call node thefinger of node , and denote it by finger node (see Table 1).
A finger table entry includes both the Chord identifier and the IP
address (and port number) of the relevant node. Note that the first
finger of is its immediate successor on the circle; for convenience
we often refer to it as the successor rather than the first finger.
In the example shown in Figure 3(b), the finger table of nodepoints to the successor nodes of identifiers
mod
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mod
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mod
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The successor of identifier is node , as this is the first node that



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the next" node on the identifier circle;
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Notationfingerintervalpredecessor

the previous node on the identifier circle;

Table 1: Definition of variables for node , using
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99follows , the successor of identifier is (trivially) node , and thesuccessor of is node .
This scheme has two important characteristics. First, each nodestores information about only a small number of other nodes, andknows more about nodes closely following it on the identifier circle
than about nodes farther away. Second, a node’s finger table generally does not contain enough information to determine the successor of an arbitrary key . For example, node 3 in Figure 3 does notknow the successor of 1, as ’s successor (node 1) does not appear
in node ’s finger table.
What happens when a node does not know the successor of a
key ? If can find a node whose ID is closer than its own to ,that node will know more about the identifier circle in the regionof than does. Thus searches its finger table for the node
whose ID most immediately precedes , and asks for the node it
knows whose ID is closest to . By repeating this process, learns
about nodes with IDs closer and closer to .
The pseudocode that implements the search process is shown in
Figure 4. The notation n.foo() stands for the function foo() being invoked at and executed on node . Remote calls and variablereferences are preceded by the remote node identifier, while local
variable references and procedure calls omit the local node. Thus,
n.foo() denotes a remote procedure call on node , n.bar, withoutparentheses, is an RPC to lookup a variable bar on node , while
foo() denotes a local function call.
find successor works by finding the immediate predecessor nodeof the desired identifier; the successor of that node must be thesuccessor of the identifier. We implement find predecessor explicitly, because it is used later to implement the join operation (Section 4.4).
When node executes find predecessor, it contacts a series ofnodes moving forward around the Chord circle towards . If nodecontacts a node such that falls between and the successorof , find predecessor is done and returns . Otherwise node
asks for the node knows about that most closely precedes .
Thus the algorithm always makes progress towards the precedessorof .
As an example, consider the Chord ring in Figure 3(b). Suppose
node wants to find the successor of identifier . Since belongs
to the circular interval, it belongs to finger interval; node
therefore checks the third entry in its finger table, which is .
Because precedes , node will ask node to find the successorof . In turn, node will infer from its finger table that ’s successor
is the node itself, and return node 1 to node 3.
The finger pointers at repeatedly doubling distances around thecircle cause each iteration of the loop in find predecessor to halve
the distance to the target identifier. From this intuition follows atheorem:

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Figure 3: (a) The finger intervals associated with node 1. (b) Finger tables and key locations for a net with nodes 0, 1, and 3, and keys 1, 2, and 6.
find a successor in an -node network is   h;P ROOF. Suppose that node wishes to resolve a query for the
successor of . Let be the node that immediately precedes . We
analyze the number of query steps to reach .
Recall that if, then forwards its query to the closest
predecessor of in its finger table. Suppose that node is in thefinger interval of node . Then since this interval is not empty, node
will finger some node in this interval. The distance (number ofidentifiers) between and is at least. But and are bothin ’s
finger interval, which means the distance between them is
at most. This means is closer to than to , or equivalently,that the distance from to is at most half the distance from to.
If the distance between the node handling the query and the predecessor halves in each step, and is at most
initially, thenwithin steps the distance will be one, meaning we have arrivedat .
In fact, as discussed above, we assume that node and key identifiers are random. In this case, the number of forwardings necessary
will bewith high probability. Afterforwardings,
the distance between the current query node and the key will be. The expected number of node identireduced to at mostfiers landing in a range of this size is 1, and it iswithhigh probability. Thus, even if the remaining steps advance by only
one node at a time, they will cross the entire remaining interval andreach key within anothersteps.

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In the section reporting our experimental results (Section 6), we
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4.4 Node Joins
In a dynamic network, nodes can join (and leave) at any time.
The main challenge in implementing these operations is preserving
the ability to locate every key in the network. To achieve this goal,
Chord needs to preserve two invariants:
1. Each node’s successor is correctly maintained.

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2. For every key , node

l to find mon ’s successor
lIp qIrKs t1uKv5v%w tgtyxz4{|mn4}l eK~ find predecessor {mn4} ;return l e p successor;// ask node l to find mon ’s predecessor
lIp qIrKs z1w sKwv%w tgtyxz {mn4}
le~ l; while {|mn {|l e l e p successor}l eK~ l e p closest preceding finger {mn4} ;return l e ;// return closest finger preceding mn
lIp v4 xtywty z1wv%w s`r0 qIr0wz{mn4}
for m ~ downto if { finger  m|p node {l  mn4}}return finger  m|p node;
return l ;// ask node.

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In order for lookups to be fast, it is also desirable for the finger
tables to be correct.
This section shows how to maintain these invariants when a single node joins. We defer the discussion of multiple nodes joining
simultaneously to Section 5, which also discusses how to handle
a node failure. Before describing the join operation, we summarize its performance (the proof of this theorem is in the companion
technical report [21]):

Figure 4: The pseudocode to find the successor node of an identifier . Remote procedure calls and variable lookups are preceded by the remote node.

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T HEOREM 3. With high probability, any node joining or leaving an -node Chord network will use
messages tore-establish the Chord routing invariants and finger tables.

To simplify the join and leave mechanisms, each node in Chord
maintains a predecessor pointer. A node’s predecessor pointer contains the Chord identifier and IP address of the immediate predecessor of that node, and can be used to walk counterclockwise aroundthe identifier circle.
To preserve the invariants stated above, Chord must perform
three tasks when a node joins the network:;;

1. Initialize the predecessor and fingers of node .
2. Update the fingers and predecessors of existing nodes to reflect the addition of .

;3. Notify the higher layer software so that it can transfer state(e.g. values) associated with keys that node is now responsible for.

;We assume that the new node learns the identity of an existing
Chord nodeby some external mechanism. Node usestoinitialize its state and add itself to the existing Chord network, as
follows.

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Initializing fingers and predecessor: Nodelearns its predecessor and fingers by asking
to look them up, using the;efinger table
keys
start int. succ.
67[7,0) 00[0,2) 02[2,6) 3

finger table
keys
start int. succ.
1[1,2) 1
2[2,4) 3
4[4,0) 6finger table
keys
start int. succ.
12[2,3) 33[3,5) 3
5[5,1) 60
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finger table
keys
start int. succ.
67[7,0) 00[0,2) 02[2,6) 32

5

finger table
keys
start int. succ.
1[1,2) 02[2,4) 3
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1

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6
finger table
keys
start int. succ.
24[4,5) 65[5,7) 6
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4

2

5

3
4

(a)

finger table
keys
start int. succ.
14[4,5) 62
5[5,7) 6
7[7,3) 0(b)

Figure 5: (a) Finger tables and key locations after node 6 joins. (b) Finger tables and key locations after node 3 leaves. Changed entries are shownin black, and unchanged in gray.

init finger table pseudocode in Figure 6. Naively performing
find successor for each of thefinger entries would give a runtime of. To reduce this, checks whether thefinger is also the correct
finger, for each . This happens when finger interval does not contain any node, and thus
finger node finger
start. It can be shown that the change
reduces the expected (and high probability) number of finger entries that must be looked up to, which reduces the overall
time to.
As a practical optimization, a newly joined node can ask an
immediate neighbor for a copy of its complete finger table and its
predecessor. can use the contents of these tables as hints to help
it find the correct values for its own tables, since ’s tables will besimilar to its neighbors’. This can be shown to reduce the time to.
fill the finger table to& D =" ! ;Q DRHO ="Q DRHO a
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Updating fingers of existing nodes: Node will need to be entered into the finger tables of some existing nodes. For example, in
Figure 5(a), node 6 becomes the third finger of nodes 0 and 1, andthe first and the second finger of node 3.
Figure 6 shows the pseudocode of the update finger table function that updates existing finger tables. Node will become thefinger of node if and only if (1) precedes by at least, andfinger of node succeeds . The first node, , that can(2) themeet these two conditions is the immediate predecessor of.
Thus, for a given , the algorithm starts with thefinger of node
, and then continues to walk in the counter-clock-wise direction
on the identifier circle until it encounters a node whose
fingerprecedes .
We show in the technical report [21] that the number of nodes
that need to be updated when a node joins the network iswith high probability. Finding and updating these nodes takes
time. A more sophisticated scheme can reduce this timeto
; however, we do not present it as we expect implementations to use the algorithm of the following section.

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when a node joins the network is to move responsibility for all
the keys for which node is now the successor. Exactly what thisentails depends on the higher-layer software using Chord, but typically it would involve moving the data associated with each key tothe new node. Node can become the successor only for keys thatwere previously the responsibility of the node immediately following , so only needs to contact that one node to transfer responsibility for all relevant keys.

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#define successor fingerllelIp yxr{|l e }if (l e ) p node// node joins the network;// is an arbitrary node in the networkle{ c%1n51y11LL  l

init finger table( );update others();// move keys infrom successor
else // is the only node in the networkfortofinger node;
predecessor;lm~  
 m|p ~ l~ llelIp r  qIr0wz L`w{|l e }finger  p node ~ l e p find successor {molg p gH53E} ;predecessor ~ successor p predecessor;
successor p predecessor ~ l ;for m ~  to  
if { finger  mp start  l  finger  m|p node }E}
finger  mp node ~ finger  mp node
else
finger  mp node ~l e p find successor { finger  mp start} ;// initialize finger table of local node;// is an arbitrary node already in the networkllIp uKsKLw xc3¡0w z1t%{o}for m ~  to // find last node  whose m ! finger might be l
 ~ find predecessor {l £¢ FHGI } ;Kp update finger table {l  mH} ;// if  is m ! finger of l , update l ’s finger table with 
lIp uKsK Lw qIr0wz L`wc{o  mH}
if { l  finger  m|p node}}finger  m|p node ~  ; ~ predecessor; // get first node preceding lKp update finger table {o  mH} ;// update all nodes whose finger// tables should refer toFigure 6: Pseudocode for the node join operation.

lp yx|r{l e }c%1n51y11LL ~ r ;g¤yy31g1 ~ l e p find successor {l} ;// periodically verify n’s immediate successor,// and tell the successor about n.
.stabilize();
if;
notify ;l ¥~ ¥ g ¤yy3LL13p c%Ln4Ly31g1
{ {|l  y¤yy3¥ LL1%}}y¤yy3LL1 ~g¤yy31g13p {l}// l e thinks it might be our predecessor.
lp r0xc% ¦§I{l e } { c%Ln51y3LL1  lK}}if {¨©ª¬«4ª¬­#ªL®#®#¯5© is nil or l e
c%Ln4Ly31g1 ~ l e ;lp q`° qIr0wz3t%{}m ~ random index ±² into finger  ;finger  m|p lK1n4 ~ find successor { finger  m|p start } ;// periodically refresh finger table entries.

Figure 7: Pseudocode for stabilization.

5.

Concurrent Operations and Failures

In practice Chord needs to deal with nodes joining the system
concurrently and with nodes that fail or leave voluntarily. Thissection describes modifications to the basic Chord algorithms described in Section 4 to handle these situations.

5.1 Stabilization
The join algorithm in Section 4 aggressively maintains the finger
tables of all nodes as the network evolves. Since this invariant isdifficult to maintain in the face of concurrent joins in a large network, we separate our correctness and performance goals. A basic“stabilization” protocol is used to keep nodes’ successor pointers
up to date, which is sufficient to guarantee correctness of lookups.
Those successor pointers are then used to verify and correct finger table entries, which allows these lookups to be fast as well as
correct.
If joining nodes have affected some region of the Chord ring,a lookup that occurs before stabilization has finished can exhibit
one of three behaviors. The common case is that all the finger table entries involved in the lookup are reasonably current, and thesteps. The second
lookup finds the correct successor incase is where successor pointers are correct, but fingers are inaccurate. This yields correct lookups, but they may be slower. In the
final case, the nodes in the affected region have incorrect successor
pointers, or keys may not yet have migrated to newly joined nodes,
and the lookup may fail. The higher-layer software using Chord
will notice that the desired data was not found, and has the optionof retrying the lookup after a pause. This pause can be short, since
stabilization fixes successor pointers quickly.
Our stabilization scheme guarantees to add nodes to a Chord ringin a way that preserves reachability of existing nodes, even in theface of concurrent joins and lost and reordered messages. Stabilization by itself won’t correct a Chord system that has split into
multiple disjoint cycles, or a single cycle that loops multiple times
around the identifier space. These pathological cases cannot be
produced by any sequence of ordinary node joins. It is unclear
whether they can be produced by network partitions and recoveries
or intermittent failures. If produced, these cases could be detected
and repaired by periodic sampling of the ring topology.
Figure 7 shows the pseudo-code for joins and stabilization; this  

; e
;e

;

code replaces Figure 6 to handle concurrent joins. When node
first starts, it calls join
, where is any known Chord node.
function asks to find the immediate successor of . By
The
itself,does not make the rest of the network aware of .
Every node runs stabilize periodically (this is how newly joined
nodes are noticed by the network). When node runs stabilize,
it asks ’s successor for the successor’s predecessor , and decides whether should be ’s successor instead. This would be
the case if node recently joined the system. stabilize also notifies node ’s successor of ’s existence, giving the successor the
chance to change its predecessor to . The successor does this only
if it knows of no closer predecessor than .
As a simple example, suppose node joins the system, and its
ID lies between nodes
and . would acquire as its successor. Node , when notified by , would acquire as its predecessor. When
next runs stabilize, it will ask
for its predecessor
would then acquire as its successor. Finally,(which is now );will notify , and will acquire
as its predecessor. At thispoint, all predecessor and successor pointers are correct.
As soon as the successor pointers are correct, calls tofind predecessor (and thus find successor) will work. Newly joined
nodes that have not yet been fingered may cause find predecessor toinitially undershoot, but the loop in the lookup algorithm will nevertheless follow successor (finger ) pointers through the newly
joined nodes until the correct predecessor is reached. Eventually
fix fingers will adjust finger table entries, eliminating the need forthese linear scans.
The following theorems (proved in the technical report [21])show that all problems caused by concurrent joins are transient.
The theorems assume that any two nodes trying to communicate
will eventually succeed.

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T HEOREM 4. Once a node can successfully resolve a given
query, it will always be able to do so in the future.
T HEOREM 5. At some time after the last join all successor
pointers will be correct.
The proofs of these theorems rely on an invariant and a termination argument. The invariant states that once node can reach node
via successor pointers, it always can. To argue termination, we
consider the case where two nodes both think they have the same
successor . In this case, each will attempt to notify , and will
eventually choose the closer of the two (or some other, closer node)
as its predecessor. At this point the farther of the two will, by contacting , learn of a better successor than . It follows that every
node progresses towards a better and better successor over time.
This progress must eventually halt in a state where every node isconsidered the successor of exactly one other node; this defines acycle (or set of them, but the invariant ensures that there will be at
most one).
We have not discussed the adjustment of fingers when nodes joinbecause it turns out that joins don’t substantially damage the performance of fingers. If a node has a finger into each interval, thenthese fingers can still be used even after joins. The distance halving
hops
argument is essentially unchanged, showing thatsuffice to reach a node “close” to a query’s target. New joins influence the lookup only by getting in between the old predecessor
and successor of a target query. These new nodes may need to bescanned linearly (if their fingers are not yet accurate). But unless atremendous number of nodes joins the system, the number of nodes
between two old nodes is likely to be very small, so the impact on
lookup is negligible. Formally, we can state the following:

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-



500

T HEOREM 6. If we take a stable network withnodes, andanother set of up to nodes joins the network with no finger pointers (but with correct successor pointers), then lookups will still taketime with high probability.



1st and 99th percentiles
450
400

¶

More generally, so long as the time it takes to adjust fingers is
less than the time it takes the network to double in size, lookups
hops.
should continue to take 

5.2 Failures and Replication

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T HEOREM 7. If we use a successor list of length
in a network that is initially stable, and then every node fails withprobability 1/2, then with high probability find successor returns
the closest living successor to the query key.

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T HEOREM 8. If we use a successor list of length
in a network that is initially stable, and then every node fails withprobability 1/2, then the expected time to execute find successor in
the failed network is.

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The intuition behind these proofs is straightforward: a node’s
successors all fail with probability, so with high probability a node will be aware of, so able to forward messages to, itsclosest living successor.
The successor-list mechanism also helps higher layer software
replicate data. A typical application using Chord might store replicas of the data associated with a key at the nodes succeeding the
key. The fact that a Chord node keeps track of its successors
means that it can inform the higher layer software when successors
come and go, and thus when the software should propagate new
replicas.

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6.

300
250
200
150

;

When a node fails, nodes whose finger tables include mustfind ’s successor. In addition, the failure of must not be allowed
to disrupt queries that are in progress as the system is re-stabilizing.
The key step in failure recovery is maintaining correct successor pointers, since in the worst case find predecessor can makeprogress using only successors. To help achieve this, each Chord
node maintains a “successor-list” of its nearest successors on the
Chord ring. In ordinary operation, a modified version of the stabilize routine in Figure 7 maintains the successor-list. If node notices that its successor has failed, it replaces it with the first live entry in its successor list. At that point, can direct ordinary lookups
for keys for which the failed node was the successor to the new
successor. As time passes, stabilize will correct finger table entries
and successor-list entries pointing to the failed node.
After a node failure, but before stabilization has completed, othernodes may attempt to send requests through the failed node as partof a find successor lookup. Ideally the lookups would be able toproceed, after a timeout, by another path despite the failure. In
many cases this is possible. All that is needed is a list of alternate
nodes, easily found in the finger table entries preceding that of thefailed node. If the failed node had a very low finger table index,
nodes in the successor-list are also available as alternates.
The technical report proves the following two theorems thatshow that the successor-list allows lookups to succeed, and be efficient, even during stabilization [21]:;350

Number of keys per node´  

7

Simulation and Experimental Results

In this section, we evaluate the Chord protocol by simulation.
The simulator uses the lookup algorithm in Figure 4 and a slightly
older version of the stabilization algorithms described in Section 5.
We also report on some preliminary experimental results from an
operational Chord-based system running on Internet hosts.

100
50
0
1

10
Number of virtual nodes

Figure 9: The 1st and the 99th percentiles of the number ofkeys per node as a function of virtual nodes mapped to a realnode. The network hasreal nodes and stores
keys.

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6.1 Protocol Simulator
The Chord protocol can be implemented in an iterative or recursive style. In the iterative style, a node resolving a lookup initiates
all communication: it asks a series of nodes for information fromtheir finger tables, each time moving closer on the Chord ring to thedesired successor. In the recursive style, each intermediate node
forwards a request to the next node until it reaches the successor.
The simulator implements the protocols in an iterative style.

6.2 Load Balance
We first consider the ability of consistent hashing to allocate keys
to nodes evenly. In a network with nodes and keys we would.
like the distribution of keys to nodes to be tight aroundWe consider a network consisting ofnodes, and vary the
total number of keys fromtoin increments of. For
each value, we repeat the experiment 20 times. Figure 8(a) plots
the mean and the 1st and 99th percentiles of the number of keys per
node. The number of keys per node exhibits large variations that
increase linearly with the number of keys. For example, in all cases
some nodes store no keys. To clarify this, Figure 8(b) plots theprobability density function (PDF) of the number of keys per node
when there arekeys stored in the network. The maximum
number of nodes stored by any node in this case is 457, orthemean value. For comparison, the 99th percentile isthe meanvalue.
One reason for these variations is that node identifiers do not uniformly cover the entire identifier space. If we divide the identifier
space in equal-sized bins, where is the number of nodes, thenwe might hope to see one node in each bin. But in fact, the proba.
bility that a particular bin does not contain any node is
For large values of this approaches.
As we discussed earlier, the consistent hashing paper solves thisproblem by associating keys with virtual nodes, and mapping multiple virtual nodes (with unrelated identifiers) to each real node.
Intuitively, this will provide a more uniform coverage of the identifier space. For example, if we allocate
randomly chosen
virtual nodes to each real node, with high probability each of thebins will containnodes [16]. We note that this does
not affect the worst-case query path length, which now becomes.
To verify this hypothesis, we perform an experiment in which
we allocate virtual nodes to each real node. In this case keys
are associated to virtual nodes instead of real nodes. We consider
again a network withreal nodes andkeys. Figure 9 shows



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Failed Lookups (Fraction of Total)

the 1st and 99th percentiles for, and 20, respectively. As expected, the 99th percentile decreases, while the 1st
percentile increases with the number of virtual nodes, . In particular, the 99th percentile decreases fromtothe meanvalue, while the 1st percentile increases from 0 to
the meanvalue. Thus, adding virtual nodes as an indirection layer can significantly improve load balance. The tradeoff is that routing table
space usage will increase as each actual node now needs times asmuch space to store the finger tables for its virtual nodes. However,
we believe that this increase can be easily accommodated in practice. For example, assuming a network withnodes, and, each node has to maintain a table with only
assuming
entries.

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0.05

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Failed Nodes (Fraction of Total)

6.3 Path Length
The performance of any routing protocol depends heavily on thelength of the path between two arbitrary nodes in the network.
In the context of Chord, we define the path length as the numberof nodes traversed during a lookup operation. From Theorem 2,
with high probability, the length of the path to resolve a query is, where is the total number of nodes in the network.
To understand Chord’s routing performance in practice, we simulated a network withnodes, storingkeys inall. We varied from toand conducted a separate experiment
for each value. Each node in an experiment picked a random setof keys to query from the system, and we measured the path length
required to resolve each query.
Figure 10(a) plots the mean, and the 1st and 99th percentiles ofpath length as a function of . As expected, the mean path length
increases logarithmically with the number of nodes, as do the 1st
and 99th percentiles. Figure 10(b) plots the PDF of the path lengthnodes ().
for a network with
Figure 10(a) shows that the path length is about. The
reason for the is as follows. Consider some random node anda random query. Let the distance in identifier space be consideredin binary representation. The most significant (say) bit of thisdistance can be corrected to 0 by following the node’s
finger.
If the next significant bit of the distance is 1, it too needs to becorrected by following a finger, but if it is 0, then no
fingeris followed—instead, we move on the thebit. In general, thenumber of fingers we need to follow will be the number of ones inthe binary representation of the distance from node to query. Since
the distance is random, we expect half thebits to be ones.

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(b)

Figure 8: (a) The mean and 1st and 99th percentiles of the number of keys stored per node in a.
density function (PDF) of the number of keys per node. The total number of keys is 0 ÈÇÉ7Æ½*  * 

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Figure 11: The fraction of lookups that fail as a function of thefraction of nodes that fail.

6.4 Simultaneous Node Failures
In this experiment, we evaluate the ability of Chord to regain
consistency after a large percentage of nodes fail simultaneously.
node network that storeskeys, andWe consider again arandomly select a fraction of nodes that fail. After the failuresoccur, we wait for the network to finish stabilizing, and then measure the fraction of keys that could not be looked up correctly. A
correct lookup of a key is one that finds the node that was originally responsible for the key, before the failures; this corresponds
to a system that stores values with keys but does not replicate thevalues or recover them after failures.
Figure 11 plots the mean lookup failure rate and the 95% confidence interval as a function of . The lookup failure rate is almost
exactly . Since this is just the fraction of keys expected to be lost
due to the failure of the responsible nodes, we conclude that there
is no significant lookup failure in the Chord network. For example,
if the Chord network had partitioned in two equal-sized halves, wewould expect one-half of the requests to fail because the querier
and target would be in different partitions half the time. Our results do not show this, suggesting that Chord is robust in the faceof multiple simultaneous node failures.

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6.5 Lookups During Stabilization
A lookup issued after some failures but before stabilization has
completed may fail for two reasons. First, the node responsible for

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0.08
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Failed Lookups (Fraction of Total)

0.07

0.06

10

12

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Each node runs the stabilization routines at randomized intervals
averaging 30 seconds; unlike the routines in Figure 7, the simulator
updates all finger table entries on every invocation. The network
starts with 500 nodes.
Figure 12 plots the average failure rates and confidence intervals.
A node failure rate ofcorresponds to one node joining andleaving every 100 seconds on average. For comparison, recall thateach node invokes the stabilize protocol once every 30 seconds.
In other words, the graph axis ranges from a rate of 1 failure
per 3 stabilization steps to a rate of 3 failures per one stabilization
step. The results presented in Figure 12 are averaged over approximately two hours of simulated time. The confidence intervals arecomputed over 10 independent runs.
The results of figure 12 can be explained roughly as follows. The
simulation has 500 nodes, meaning lookup path lengths averagearound . A lookup fails if its finger path encounters a failed node.
If nodes fail, the probability that one of them is on the finger pathis roughly, or. This would suggest a failure rate ofabout % if we have 3 failures between stabilizations. The graphshows results in this ball-park, but slightly worse since it might takemore than one stabilization to completely clear out a failed node.

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0.03

0.02

0.01

0
0

0.02

0.04
0.06
Node Fail/Join Rate (Per Second)

0.08

0.1

Figure 12: The fraction of lookups that fail as a function of
the rate (over time) at which nodes fail and join. Only failurescaused by Chord state inconsistency are included, not failuresdue to lost keys.

the key may have failed. Second, some nodes’ finger tables andpredecessor pointers may be inconsistent due to concurrent joins
and node failures. This section evaluates the impact of continuous
joins and failures on lookups.
In this experiment, a lookup is considered to have succeeded if
it reaches the current successor of the desired key. This is slightly
optimistic: in a real system, there might be periods of time in which
the real successor of a key has not yet acquired the data associatedwith the key from the previous successor. However, this method allows us to focus on Chord’s ability to perform lookups, rather thanon the higher-layer software’s ability to maintain consistency of its
own data. Any query failure will be the result of inconsistencies in
Chord. In addition, the simulator does not retry queries: if a queryis forwarded to a node that is down, the query simply fails. Thus,
the results given in this section can be viewed as the worst-casescenario for the query failures induced by state inconsistency.
Because the primary source of inconsistencies is nodes joining
and leaving, and because the main mechanism to resolve these inconsistencies is the stabilize protocol, Chord’s performance will besensitive to the frequency of node joins and leaves versus the frequency at which the stabilization protocol is invoked.
In this experiment, key lookups are generated according to a
Poisson process at a rate of one per second. Joins and failures
are modeled by a Poisson process with the mean arrival rate of .

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This section presents latency measurements obtained from a prototype implementation of Chord deployed on the Internet. The
Chord nodes are at ten sites on a subset of the RON test-bed
in the United States [1], in California, Colorado, Massachusetts,
New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. The Chord software
runs on UNIX, uses 160-bit keys obtained from the SHA-1 cryptographic hash function, and uses TCP to communicate between
nodes. Chord runs in the iterative style. These Chord nodes arepart of an experimental distributed file system [7], though this section considers only the Chord component of the system.
Figure 13 shows the measured latency of Chord lookups over arange of numbers of nodes. Experiments with a number of nodes
larger than ten are conducted by running multiple independent
copies of the Chord software at each site. This is different fromvirtual nodes at each site to provide good load
runningbalance; rather, the intention is to measure how well our implementation scales even though we do not have more than a small numberof deployed nodes.
For each number of nodes shown in Figure 13, each physicalsite issues 16 Chord lookups for randomly chosen keys one-byone. The graph plots the median, the 5th, and the 95th percentile  

700
5th, 50th, and 95th percentiles

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600

500
Lookup Latency (ms)applications of Chord, especially if each message must be sent toa random Internet host. Instead of placing its fingers at distancesthat are all powers of , Chord could easily be changed to place its
fingers at distances that are all integer powers of. Undersuch a scheme, a single routing hop could decrease the distance to aquery toof the original distance, meaning thathops would suffice. However, the number of fingers needed would
increase to.
A different approach to improving lookup latency might be touse server selection. Each finger table entry could point to the first
nodes in that entry’s interval on the ID ring, and a node could
measure the network delay to each of the nodes. The nodes
are generally equivalent for purposes of lookup, so a node could
forward lookups to the one with lowest delay. This approach would
be most effective with recursive Chord lookups, in which the nodemeasuring the delays is also the node forwarding the lookup.

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)

100

0
0

20

40

60

80

100
120
Number of Nodes

140

160

180

200

Figure 13: Lookup latency on the Internet prototype, as a function of the total number of nodes. Each of the ten physical sites
runs multiple independent copies of the Chord node software.

)"Ï="5$  Ð` )8. Conclusionof lookup latency. The median latency ranges from 180 to 285 ms,
depending on number of nodes. For the case of 180 nodes, a typical lookup involves five two-way message exchanges: four for the
Chord lookup, and a final message to the successor node. Typicalround-trip delays between sites are 60 milliseconds (as measuredby ping). Thus the expected lookup time for 180 nodes is about
300 milliseconds, which is close to the measured median of 285.
The low 5th percentile latencies are caused by lookups for keys
close (in ID space) to the querying node and by query hops that remain local to the physical site. The high 95th percentiles are caused
by lookups whose hops follow high delay paths.
The lesson from Figure 13 is that lookup latency grows slowly
with the total number of nodes, confirming the simulation resultsthat demonstrate Chord’s scalability.

7.

Future Work

Based on our experience with the prototype mentioned in Section 6.6, we would like to improve the Chord design in the following areas.
Chord currently has no specific mechanism to heal partitioned
rings; such rings could appear locally consistent to the stabilization
procedure. One way to check global consistency is for each nodeto periodically ask other nodes to do a Chord lookup for ; if
the lookup does not yield node , there may be a partition. This
will only detect partitions whose nodes know of each other. One
way to obtain this knowledge is for every node to know of the same
small set of initial nodes. Another approach might be for nodes
to maintain long-term memory of a random set of nodes they haveencountered in the past; if a partition forms, the random sets in one
partition are likely to include nodes from the other partition.
A malicious or buggy set of Chord participants could present anincorrect view of the Chord ring. Assuming that the data Chordis being used to locate is cryptographically authenticated, this is athreat to availability of data rather than to authenticity. The same
approach used above to detect partitions could help victims realizethat they are not seeing a globally consistent view of the Chordring.
An attacker could target a particular data item by inserting a node
into the Chord ring with an ID immediately following the item’s
key, and having the node return errors when asked to retrieve thedata. Requiring (and checking) that nodes use IDs derived from the
SHA-1 hash of their IP addresses makes this attack harder.
messages per lookup may be too many for some
Even

;

;

 

;

Many distributed peer-to-peer applications need to determine
the node that stores a data item. The Chord protocol solves thischallenging problem in decentralized manner. It offers a powerful primitive: given a key, it determines the node responsible forstoring the key’s value, and does so efficiently. In the steady state,in an -node network, each node maintains routing informationfor only aboutother nodes, and resolves all lookups via
messages to other nodes. Updates to the routing informesmation for nodes leaving and joining require only
sages.
Attractive features of Chord include its simplicity, provable correctness, and provable performance even in the face of concurrent
node arrivals and departures. It continues to function correctly, albeit at degraded performance, when a node’s information is only
partially correct. Our theoretical analysis, simulations, and experimental results confirm that Chord scales well with the number ofnodes, recovers from large numbers of simultaneous node failures
and joins, and answers most lookups correctly even during recovery.
We believe that Chord will be a valuable component for peerto-peer, large-scale distributed applications such as cooperative filesharing, time-shared available storage systems, distributed indicesfor document and service discovery, and large-scale distributed
computing platforms.

      

Acknowledgments
We thank Frank Dabek for the measurements of the Chord prototype described in Section 6.6, and David Andersen for setting up
the testbed used in those measurements.

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