PariMulo: Kad

With the advent of broadband connections and computing power available in every kind of digital equipment there is a need to share resources, such as information, among people. To fulfill this need in these years we have seen an amazing growth of distributed systems: cloud computing services, web applications, peer-to-peer systems, etc. In this context is born PariPari, a project which aims to build a modern peer-to-peer network of computers that runs various services, among which there is an eMule-compatible client, called PariMulo. As it is well known even to less computer-savvy people, there have been some problems with the centralized server-based structure of the original eDonkey network, and it has helped the development of a new network, Kad, based upon the Kademlia protocol. This work focuses on the implementation of Kad in PariMulo, starting by first describing the protocol and how the network works, and then providing an in-depth vision of the implementation considering security and performance issues. Finally we make some observations about future possibilities of development