How does DHT in torrents work?

Question

I'm coding a p2p implementation that I would like to make decentralized however I'm having some trouble grasping how DHT in protocols like bittorrent work. How does the client know where the peers are if there is no tracker? Are peers stored in the actual torrent file?

Answer 1

See: P2P and Networking

Answer 2

The general theory can be found in wikipedia's article on Kademlia. The specific protocol specification used in bittorrent is here: http://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentDraftDHTProtocol

Answer 3

What happens with bittorrent and a DHT is that at the beginning bittorrent uses information embedded in the torrent file to go to either a tracker or one of a set of nodes from the DHT. Then once it finds one node, it can continue to find others and persist using the DHT without needing a centralized tracker to maintain it.

The original information bootstraps the later use of the DHT.

Answer 4

With trackerless/DHT torrents, peer IP addresses are stored in the DHT using the BitTorrent infohash as the key. Since all a tracker does, basically, is respond to put/get requests, this functionality corresponds exactly to the interface that a DHT (distributed hash table) provides: it allows you to look up and store IP addresses in the DHT by infohash.

So a "get" request would look up a BT infohash and return a set of IP addresses. A "put" stores an IP address for a given infohash. This corresponds to the "announce" request you would otherwise make to the tracker to receive a dictionary of peer IP addresses.

In a DHT, peers are randomly assigned to store values belonging to a small fraction of the key space; the hashing ensures that keys are distributed randomly across participating peers. The DHT protocol (Kademlia for BitTorrent) ensures that put/get requests are routed efficiently to the peers responsible for maintaining a given key's IP address lists.