Information Dissemination in Distributed Organic Computing Systems with Distributed Hash Tables

Decision making in a self-managing distributed system requires information about the system's state. Accurate and timely information enables the overall system to respond better to state changes. Distributed systems can use different network protocols to connect the nodes. Since there is no guarantee that all protocols are able to send broadcasts or that broadcasts can be sent over different protocols we use distributed hash tables to enable an application layer broadcast, which only sends unicast messages in the network layer to spread node status information in a distributed system. Our research shows that we can spread information without sending unnecessary messages. By choosing the node IDs systematically, instead of generating them randomly, we can influence the network usage in badly connected network segments.