Starting with Napster and Gnutella, peer-to-peer systems became an integrated part of the Internet fabric attracting millions of users. This book provides an introduction to the field. It draws together prerequisites from various fields, presents techniques and methodologies, and gives an overview on the applications of the peer-to-peer paradigm.

This text demonstrates through clear explanations how to easily leverage the power of peer-to-peer networks to achieve seamless personal and business communication and transactions.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, or peer computing, is a paradigm that is viewed as a potential technology for redesigning distributed architectures and, consequently, distributed processing. Yet the scale and dynamism that characterize P2P systems demand that we reexamine traditional distributed technologies. A paradigm shift that includes self-reorganization, adaptation and resilience is called for. On the other hand, the increased computational power of such networks opens up completely new applications, such as in digital content sharing, scientific computation, gaming, or collaborative work environments. In this book, Vu, Lupu and Ooi present the technical challenges offered by P2P systems, and the means that have been proposed to address them. They provide a thorough and comprehensive review of recent advances on routing and discovery methods; load balancing and replication techniques; security, accountability and anonymity, as well as trust and reputation schemes; programming models and P2P systems and projects. Besides surveying existing methods and systems, they also compare and evaluate some of the more promising schemes. The need for such a book is evident. It provides a single source for practitioners, researchers and students on the state of the art. For practitioners, this book explains best practice, guiding selection of appropriate techniques for each application. For researchers, this book provides a foundation for the development of new and more effective methods. For students, it is an overview of the wide range of advanced techniques for realizing effective P2P systems, and it can easily be used as a text for an advanced course on Peer-to-Peer Computing and Technologies, or as a companion text for courses on various subjects, such as distributed systems, and grid and cluster computing.

While people are now using peer-to-peer (P2P) applications for various processes, such as file sharing and video streaming, many research and engineering issues still need to be tackled in order to further advance P2P technologies. Peer-to-Peer Computing: Applications, Architecture, Protocols, and Challenges provides comprehensive theoretical and practical coverage of the major features of contemporary P2P systems and examines the obstacles to further success. Setting the stage for understanding important research issues in P2P systems, the book first introduces various P2P network architectures. It then details the topology control research problem as well as existing technologies for handling topology control issues. The author describes novel and interesting incentive schemes for enticing peers to cooperate and explores recent innovations on trust issues. He also examines security problems in a P2P network. The final chapter addresses the future of the field. Throughout the text, the highly popular P2P IPTV application, PPLive, is used as a case study to illustrate the practical aspects of the concepts covered. Addressing the unique challenges of P2P systems, this book presents practical applications of recent theoretical results in P2P computing. It also stimulates further research on critical issues, including performance and security problems.

The term "peer-to-peer" has come to be applied to networks that expect end users to contribute their own files, computing time, or other resources to some shared project. Even more interesting than the systems' technical underpinnings are their socially disruptive potential: in various ways they return content, choice, and control to ordinary users. While this book is mostly about the technical promise of peer-to-peer, we also talk about its exciting social promise. Communities have been forming on the Internet for a long time, but they have been limited by the flat interactive qualities of email and Network newsgroups. People can exchange recommendations and ideas over these media, but have great difficulty commenting on each other's postings, structuring information, performing searches, or creating summaries. If tools provided ways to organize information intelligently, and if each person could serve up his or her own data and retrieve others' data, the possibilities for collaboration would take off. Peer-to-peer technologies along with metadata could enhance almost any group of people who share an interest--technical, cultural, political, medical, you name it. This book presents the goals that drive the developers of the best-known peer-to-peer systems, the problems they've faced, and the technical solutions they've found. Learn here the essentials of peer-to-peer from leaders of the field: Nelson Minar and Marc Hedlund of target="new">Popular Power, on a history of peer-to-peer Clay Shirky of acceleratorgroup, on where peer-to-peer is likely to be headed Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly & Associates, on redefining the public's perceptions Dan Bricklin, cocreator of Visicalc, on harvesting information from end-users David Anderson of SETI@home, on how SETI@Home created the world's largest computer Jeremie Miller of Jabber, on the Internet as a collection of conversations Gene Kan of Gnutella and GoneSilent.com, on lessons from Gnutella for peer-to-peer technologies Adam Langley of Freenet, on Freenet's present and upcoming architecture Alan Brown of Red Rover, on a deliberately low-tech content distribution system Marc Waldman, Lorrie Cranor, and Avi Rubin of AT&T Labs, on the Publius project and trust in distributed systems Roger Dingledine, Michael J. Freedman, andDavid Molnar of Free Haven, on resource allocation and accountability in distributed systems Rael Dornfest of O'Reilly Network and Dan Brickley of ILRT/RDF Web, on metadata Theodore Hong of Freenet, on performance Richard Lethin of Reputation Technologies, on how reputation can be built online Jon Udell ofBYTE and Nimisha Asthagiri andWalter Tuvell of Groove Networks, on security Brandon Wiley of Freenet, on gateways between peer-to-peer systems You'll find information on the latest and greatest systems as well as upcoming efforts in this book.

Peer-to-peer systems are now widely used and have become the focus of attention for many researchers over the past decade. A number of algorithms for decentralized search, content distribution, and media streaming have been developed. This book provides fundamental concepts for the benchmarking of those algorithms in peer-to-peer systems. It also contains a collection of characteristic benchmarking results. The chapters of the book have been organized in three topical sections on: Fundamentals of Benchmarking in P2P Systems; Synthetic Benchmarks for Peer-to-Peer Systems; and Application Benchmarks for Peer-to-Peer Systems. They are preceded by a detailed introduction to the subject.