Peer-to-Peer and Web Computing

摘要

Peer-to-peer computing has evolved recently from an attractive new paradigm into an exciting and vibrant research field bringing together researchers from distributed systems, networks and theory. Peer-to-peer systems are characterized as being decentralized, self-organizing distributed systems, in which all or most communication is symmetric. Peer-to-peer technologies are aimed for building large-scale distributed services. In particular peer-to-peer architectures could be used in the context of web and grid computing to provide scalable self-organizing resources/services. Because of their size, autonomy and possibly high volatility, peer-to-peer systems provide the opportunity for researchers to re-evaluate many fields of distributed computing, such as protocols, infrastructures, security, certification, fault tolerance, scheduling, performance analysis, etc.