Overview
Peer-to-peer networks (P2P) have gained publicity in last years mainly because of Gnutella and other file sharing software that have presented the potentiality of linking free and idle resources together at the edges of Internet. When these resources can be found easily in the network a community of users can get a massive amount of resources almost without any investments on expensive facilities. P2P research group is located in University of Jyväskylä and we study peer-to-peer communication and behavior of peer-to-peer networks concentrating on distributed search of resources in mobile social P2P networks.
Properties associated to peer-to-peer networks include:
- equality between nodes and decentralized network structure
- no performance bottleneck and no single point of failure
- distribution can affect storage as well as computing resources
- highly fault-tolerant and robust system
- cost-efficient
- technology applicable in mobile and wired network infrastructures
- organisation of communication between nodes is challenging (no central point of control)
- resource discovery and sharing is complex (no central index)
- achieving trust between nodes is problematic (nodes usually controlled by different organisations and users)