Distributed network file storage for a serverless (P2P) network

The design of a persistent peer-to-peer (P2P) network storage application is presented in the paper. SNS separates the application from the underlying P2P network, i.e. the serverless layer. The serverless layer is responsible for routine networking tasks such as self-organisation and maintaining the network state information. The application specific functions are implemented through the file information protocol e.g. maintaining and synchronizing file and disk space information by using lightweight XML-formatted messages. The distributed storage is made to appear as a single large network drive, with all the main features of a conventional file system being made available to the client nodes.