The content-addressable network (CAN) is a distributed, decentralized P2P infrastructure that provides hash table functionality on an Internet-like scale.
CAN was one of the original four distributed hash table proposals, introduced concurrently with Chord, Pastry, and Tapestry.
The architectural design is a virtual multi-dimensional Cartesian coordinate space, a type of overlay network, on a multi-torus.
[1] A CAN node maintains a routing table that holds the IP address and virtual coordinate zone of each of its neighbors.
The validation test may cycle through all neighboring zones to determine if a successful merge can occur.
Sylvia Ratnasamy, Paul Francis, Mark Handley, Richard Karp, Scott Shenker