This paper presents a novel mechanism that enables mobile devices to efficiently participate
in Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs). By selectively dropping messages, we can significantly
reduce traffic and thus the energy consumption of mobile nodes with only minor performance
degradation. The protocol extension preserves compatibility with existing widely used
DHT systems. We evaluate the solution by measuring the energy-consumption of mobile
phones participating in the Kademlia-based Mainline BitTorrent DHT, which consists
of over one million nodes. We further analyze the impact of our mechanism on the performance
of the DHT by means of an analytical model.
