Content addressable network

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The Content Addressable Network (CAN) was one of the original four distributed hash table proposals (Ratnasamy 2001), introduced concurrently with Chord, Pastry, and Tapestry. Although intended to be more general, the term content addressable network came to be associated with Ratnasamy et al.'s specific design.

Like other DHTs, CAN is a distributed, decentralized P2P infrastructure that provides hash table functionality on an Internet-like scale. CAN is designed to be scalable, fault tolerant, and self-organizing. CAN is built around a virtual multi-dimensional Cartesian coordinate space on a multi-torus. This d-dimensional coordinate space is completely logical. The entire coordinate space is dynamically partitioned among all the peers (N number of peers) in the system such that every peer possesses its individual, distinct zone within the overall space. A CAN peer maintains a routing table that holds the IP address and virtual coordinate zone of each of its neighbor coordinates. A peer routes a message towards its destination using a simple greedy forwarding to the neighbor peer that is closest to the destination coordinates. CAN is a distributed system that maps keys onto values.