Automatic Discovery Mechanism of Blockchain Nodes Based on the Kademlia Algorithm

Abstract

The emergence of the Ethereum platform has led to the unprecedented development of blockchain technology. Ethereum ensures that blockchain technology becomes the core technology of Bitcoin, and users can expand and develop other applications on the Ethereum platform. P2P networks are applied in Ethereum to achieve peer-to-peer communication in transactions, with nodes being equal to each other and without trust. Ethereum is a peer-to-peer distributed network. Inter-node communication does not pass through a trustworthy intermediary, and each node can get the latest data by sending requests to its neighboring nodes. Each node acts as both a server and a service provider. This mode guarantees the data synchronization of all the nodes in Ethereum, so it is very important to study the automatic discovery of nodes. This paper mainly analyzes the automatic discovery mechanism of nodes based on the Kademlia algorithm, including principle of the protocol, the process of communication handshake and the specific algorithm mechanism. At last, we used the Mist wallet to observe the results of automatic discovery of nodes in the Ethereum client’s, and used Python to do a simple experiment for automatic discovery of Ethereum nodes.