DRinge

DRinge is a concept referring to a family of distributed data structures and routing protocols that organize computing nodes into one or more interlocking rings to support scalable, fault-tolerant communication in decentralized networks.

In DRinge, each node maintains a local view of its neighbors on one or more rings, including successor and predecessor pointers and a set of route hints. Ring maintenance is performed by periodic stabilization routines that adjust pointers when nodes join or depart, ensuring eventual consistency of the ring structure. Routing is performed by traversing the ring using aware algorithms or leveraging shortcut pointers to reduce hops; the design aims to bound routing tables and keep per-node state small even as the network scales.

Security features may include authentication of ring links and encryption of control messages; some variants separate the ring topology from application data by using end-to-end encryption.

Variants include DRinge-L for low-latency routing in smaller networks and DRinge-S for secure, churn-resilient deployments.

Applications range from distributed file systems and content delivery networks to sensor networks and edge computing platforms.

History: The term DRinge has appeared in theoretical discussions and early prototypes exploring ring-based interconnects in distributed systems; it is not standardized and remains a topic of research and speculative design.

See also: distributed hash table, ring topology, Chord, Kademlia, consistent hashing.