Characterization of Self-Organization

Self-organization is used in many disciplines to refer to several, related phenomenons. Some of the more prominent phenomenons summarized under the umbrella of self-organization are autonomy, self-maintenance, optimization, adaptivity, rearrangement, reproduction or emergence. An exact match, however, has yet to be accomplished. Even in the context of this book on Peer-to-Peer systems, self-organization is used in various forms to relate to several interesting but distinct properties of Peer-to-Peer networking.