Peer-to-Peer Networks

The concept of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking has received considerable interests recently. A P2P network has no centralized management but all network functionalities are provided by the peers (nodes) themselves in a distributed manner. The most popular P2P systems are file sharing systems, however P2P networking is not restricted to file sharing, but could be applied to any system where peers pool their resources (e.g., files, storage, compute cycles, communication bandwidth) in order to inexpensively handle tasks that would normally require large costly servers. In our research, we focus on issues evolving around resource allocation and cooperation among peers.