A Review of Peer-to-Peer Networking on the Internet

Peer-to-Peer is a model of communication where every node in the network acts alike. It is as opposed to the Client-Server model, where one node provides services and other nodes use the services. Peer-to-peer computing takes advantage of existing desktop computing power and networking connectivity, allowing economical clients to leverage their collective power to benefit the entire enterprise.Peer-to-peer computing has been envisaged to solve computing scenarios which require spatial distribution of computation, spatial distribution of content, real-time collaboration, scalability or fault-tolerance at reduced costs. All these factors have influenced the emergence of stronger computing-capable peer-to-peer systems.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems enable computers to share information and other resources with their networked peers in large-scale distributed computing environments. The resulting overlay networks are inherently decentralized, self-organizing, and self-coordinating. Well-designed P2P systems should be adaptive to peer arrivals and departures, resilient to failures, tolerant to network performance variations, and scalable to huge numbers of peers (tens of thousands to millions). As P2P research becomes more mature, new challenges emerge to support complex and heterogeneous decentralized environments for sharing and managing data, resources, and knowledge with highly dynamic and unpredictable usage patterns.

Peer-to-peer computing has been successful in attracting more peers due to its rich contents, fast response time and trust worthy environment. The enormous applications available on the internet are further strengthened with the application of peer-to-peer computing. This paper intends to review the background, challenges and future of P2P Networking.