A Survey of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Technologies

Legal Notices The information in this document is subject to change without notice. ELTRUN makes no warranty of any kind with regard to this document, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for its particular purpose. ELTRUN shall not be held liable for errors contained herein or direct, indirect, special, incidental or consequential damages in connection with the furnishing, performance, or use of this material. In the recent years, the evolution of a new wave of innovative network architectures labeled " peer-to-peer (p2p) " has been witnessed. Such architectures and systems are characterized by direct access between peer computers, rather than through a centralized server. The recently formed Peer-to-Peer Working Group, a consortium including industry leaders aiming at the advancement of infrastructures and best-known practices for peer-to-peer computing, defines p2p as the " sharing of computer resources by direct exchange ". Apart from resources, p2p offers a way of decentralizing administration (as well as cost). File sharing is the dominant p2p application on the Internet, allowing users to easily contribute, search and obtain content. Grid computing, which has emerged as a field distinguished from conventional computing by its focus on wide area distributed computing, large-scale resource sharing and problem solving is closely related to p2p. It is expected that there will be an even stronger convergence between them as p2p technologies become more sophisticated. P2p file sharing architectures can be classified by their " degree of centralization " , i.e. to what extent they rely to one or more servers to facilitate the interaction between peers. Three categories are identified: Purely decentralized, partially centralized and hybrid decentralized. Furthermore, highly dynamic p2p networks of peers with complex topology can be differentiated by the degree to which they contain some structure or are created ad-hoc. By structure we refer to the way in which the content of the network is located: Is there a way of directly knowing which peers contain some specific content, or does one need to " randomly " search the entire network to locate it? Three categories of systems are examined: Structured, loosely structured and unstructured. Various p2p architectures from these categories are examined with focus on the way they operate and how successfully they address issues such as scalability, network latency, security, privacy, anonymity and others. The shortcomings of these systems and the latest variations, developments and trends in p2p file sharing …

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