Two years ago, I had to write a paper like thing at school on any subject, so we (me and a classmate) chose Distributed Hash tables in Peer to Peer Networks.
Long story short, they are used to accelerate the search process in peer to peer networks and make it more efficient. They are used for example in modern implementations of BitTorrent. The paper is about the technique itself, security concerns and samples of networks using DHT, including Chord and especially Kademlia.
The first part describes peer to peer networks in general and addresses the problems that these networks got. Samples include Napster and Gnutella.
The second part is about DHT itself, networks using DHT and how security problems in DHT P2P networks may be circumvented
The last part is about the implementation of a small sample network using DHT to build a secure and reliable text communication network called XinC
There's only a German version yet, if I find some time, I'll translate it.
Download: http://pspace.org/downloads/dht.pdf
