The subject of “P2P” attracts much interest in the networking community, even though many disagree on its exact meaning. P2P technology promises to radically change the future of networking, yet the concept has existed for years. P2P also raises interesting cultural issues despite its “policy free” architecture. All in all, these apparent paradoxes of P2P only add to its mystique.
Peer to peer networks are gaining widespread acceptance as a scalable and robust model for data-sharing Internet applications. Building on the successful, though technically deficient, legacy of Napster and Gnutella, these systems strive to provide a scalable, decentralized, fault-tolerant, and self-stabilizing architecture for large scale data sharing applications. The broad vision of P2P systems, however, goes well beyond the sharing of music files.
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