By decentralized networking I’m going to assume you mean peer-to-peer networking. “Decentralized networking” would include the Internet. All P2P networking is

By decentralized networking I’m going to assume you mean peer-to-peer networking. “Decentralized networking” would include the Internet. All P2P networking is usually based on some form of key-based routing, kicked off by the discovery of distributed hash tables. I’d start with the Wikipedia articles on DHT: - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key-based_routing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key-based_routing - Liz, Crowcroft; et al. "A survey and comparison of peer-to-peer overlay network schemes" https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2005/AdvSysTop/survey.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2005/AdvSysTop/survey.pdf - Guido Urdaneta, Guillaume Pierre and Maarten van Steen. A Survey of DHT Security Techniques” http://www.globule.org/publi/SDST_acmcs2009.html http://www.globule.org/publi/SDST_acmcs2009.html - Chris Lesniewski-Laas. "A Sybil-proof one-hop DHT" https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/sybil-dht-socialnets08.pdf https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/sybil-dht-socialnets08.pdf The unsolved problems in P2P networking are compact routing and Sybil resistance. The cutting-edge for P2P networking projects is Yggdrasil, a fully end-to-end encrypted IPv6 mesh network that uses a spanning-tree to route packets. It’s the continuation of CJDNS. https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/about.html https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/about.html