Analysis of P2P Communications in Online Collaborative Teamwork Settings

P2P technologies have been considered as one of the most disruptive Internet technologies in achieving fully decentralized and efficient communication in distributed systems. Indeed, the nature of the direct communication among peers in the system, being these machines or people, makes possible to overcome the limitations of the flat communications through email, newsgroups and other forum-based communication forms. In fact, the usefulness of P2P paradigm has been shown not only in the development of stand alone P2P applications, but also in using its features in other Internet-based systems and paradigms such as Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANETs), Groupware systems, Mobile teamwork and in a broader sense in distributed systems that need coordination, replication, awareness and synchronization. In this paper we analyse the use of the P2P technologies in collaborative teamwork with a special emphasis on the mobile collaborative teams. A mobile team is a group of people that are geographically distributed and collaborate together work for the accomplishment of a project. Mobile teamwork has become an important paradigm of the today workforce especially in Small and Medium size Enterprises to cover many fields such as field work, journalism, online collaborative learning, disaster management scenarios and businesses. As a result of our analysis, we show how P2P technology as well as the core P2P functions and protocols can enhance the collaborative teamwork of various forms, including mobile teamwork.