To Peer
A peer-to-peer , commonly abbreviated to P2P , is any distributed network architecture composed of participants that make a portion of their resources (such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth) directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination instances (such as servers or stable hosts). Peers are both suppliers and consumers of resources, in contrast to the traditional client-server model where only servers supply, and clients consume.
Peer-to-peer was popularized by file sharing systems like Napster. Peer-to-peer file sharing networks have inspired new structures and philosophies in other areas of human interaction. In such social contexts, peer-to-peer as a meme refers to the egalitarian social networking that is currently emerging throughout society, enabled by Internet technologies in general.
Architecture of P2P systems
Peer-to-peer networks are typically formed dynamically by ad-hoc additions of nodes. In an 'ad-hoc' network, the removal of nodes has no significant impact on the network. The distributed architecture of an application in a peer-to-peer system provides enhanced scalability and service robustness.
Peer-to-peer systems often implement an Application Layer overlay network on top of the native or physical network topology. Such overlays are used for indexing and peer discovery. Content is typically exchanged directly over the underlying Internet Protocol (IP) network. Anonymous peer-to-peer systems are an exception, and implement extra routing layers to obscure the identity of the source or destination of queries.
In structured peer-to-peer networks, connections in the overlay are fixed. They typically use distributed hash table-based (DHT) indexing, such as in the Chord system (MIT).
Unstructured peer-to-peer networks do not provide any algorithm for organization or optimization of network connections. In particular, three models of unstructured architecture are defined. In pure peer-to-peer systems the entire network consists solely of equipotent peers. There is only one routing layer, as there are no preferred nodes with any special infrastructure function. Hybrid peer-to-peer systems allow such infrastructure nodes to exist, often called supernodes . In centralized peer-to-peer systems, a central server is used for indexing functions and to bootstrap the entire system. Although this has similarities with a structured architecture, the connections between peers are not determined by any algorithm. The first prominent and popular peer-to-peer file sharing system, Napster, was an example of the centralized model. Gnutella and Freenet, on the other hand, are examples of the decentralized model. Kazaa is an example of the hybrid model.
P2P networks are typically used for connecting nodes via largely ad hoc connections. Sharing content files (see file sharing) containing audio, video, data or anything in digital format is very common, and real time data, such as telephony traffic, is also passed using P2P technology.
A pure P2P network does not have the notion of clients or servers but only equal peer nodes that simultaneously function as both "clients" and "servers" to the other nodes on the network. This model of network arrangement differs from the client-server model where communication is usually to and from a central server. A typical example of a file transfer that is not P2P is an FTP server where the client and server programs are quite distinct: the clients initiate the download/uploads, and the servers react to and satisfy these requests.
The P2P overlay network consists of all the participating peers as network nodes. There are links between any two nodes that know each other: i.e. if a participating peer knows the location of another peer in the P2P network, then there is a directed edge from the former node to the latter in the overlay network. Based on how the nodes in the overlay network are linked to each other, we can classify the P2P networks as unstructured or structured.
Structured systems
Structured P2P network employ a globally consistent protocol to ensure that any node can efficiently route a search to some peer that has the desired file, even if the file is extremely rare. Such a guarantee necessitates a more structured pattern of overlay links. By far the most common type of structured P2P network is the distributed hash table (DHT), in which a variant of consistent hashing is used to assign ownership of each file to a particular peer, in a way analogous to a traditional hash table's assignment of each key to a particular array slot.
Distributed hash tables
Distributed hash tables (DHTs) are a class of decentralized distributed systems that provide a lookup service similar to a hash table: ( key , value ) pairs are stored in the DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key. Responsibility for maintaining the mapping from keys to values is distributed among the nodes, in such a way that a change in the set of participants causes a minimal amount of disruption. This allows DHTs to scale to extremely large numbers of nodes and to handle continual node arrivals, departures, and failures.
DHTs form an infrastructure that can be used to build peer-to-peer networks. Notable distributed networks that use DHTs include BitTorrent's distributed tracker, the Kad network, the Storm botnet, YaCy, and the Coral Content Distribution Network.
Some prominent research projects include the Chord project, the PAST storage utility, the P-Grid, a self-organized and emerging overlay network and the CoopNet content distribution system (see below for external links related to these projects).
DHT-based networks have been widely utilized for accomplishing efficient resource discovery for grid computing systems, as it aids in resource management and scheduling of applications. Resource discovery activity involve searching for the appropriate resource types that match the user’s application requirements. Recent advances in the domain of decentralized resource discovery have been based on extending the existing DHTs with the capability of multi-dimensional data organization and query routing. Majority of the efforts have looked at embedding spatial database indices such as the Space Filling Curves (SFCs) including the Hilbert curves, Z-curves, k-d tree, MX-CIF Quad tree and R*-tree for managing, routing, and indexing of complex Grid resource query objects over DHT networks. Spatial indices are well suited for handling the complexity of Grid resource queries. Although some spatial indices can have issues as regards to routing load-balance in case of a skewed data set, all the spatial indices are more scalable in terms of the number of hops traversed and messages generated while searching and routing Grid resource queries.
Unstructured systems
An unstructured P2P network is formed when the overlay links are established arbitrarily. Such networks can be easily constructed as a new peer that wants to join the network can copy existing links of another node and then form its own links over time. In an unstructured P2P network, if a peer wants to find a desired piece of data in the network, the query has to be flooded through the network to find as many peers as possible that share the data. The main disadvantage with such networks is that the queries may not always be resolved. Popular content is likely to be available at several peers and any peer searching for it is likely to find the same thing. But if a peer is looking for rare data shared by only a few other peers, then it is highly unlikely that search will be successful. Since there is no correlation between a peer and the content managed by it, there is no guarantee that flooding will find a peer that has the desired data. Flooding also causes a high amount of signaling traffic in the network and hence such networks typically have very poor search efficiency. Many of the popular P2P networks are unstructured.
In pure P2P networks: Peers act as equals, merging the roles of clients and server. In such networks, there is no central server managing the network, neither is there a central router. Some examples of pure P2P Application Layer networks designed for file sharing are Gnutella (pre v0.4) and Freenet.
There also exist hybrid P2P systems, which distribute their clients into two groups: client nodes and overlay nodes. Typically, each client is able to act according to the momentary need of the network and can become part of the respective overlay network used to coordinate the P2P structure. This division between normal and 'better' nodes is done in order to address the scaling problems on early pure P2P networks. Examples for such networks are for example Gnutella (after v0.4) or G2.
An other type of hybrid P2P network are networks using on the one hand central server(s) or bootstrapping mechanisms, on the other hand P2P for their data transfers. These networks are in general called 'centralized networks' because of their lack of ability to work without their central server(s). An example for su
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