From cells to organisms: long-term guarantees on service provisioning in peer-to-peer networks

The peer-to-peer paradigm gained more and more impact in the last years. The reason for P2P arising now is related to the continuous development of device capabilities in the last years, like CPU power, storage space and bandwidth. However, the demand for services and resources is permanently increasing, although the peers have a variety of other resources themselves. In this paper we present the idea of a P2P system acting as a service provider using the resources of participating peers and stating guarantees on the quality of the service it provides. In order to fulfill these service level agreements, the peers confederate to a distributed supervisor of peer resources (DISPRO), monitoring the network, predicting trends on resource availabilities and deciding on resource allocation strategies. This paper discusses the challenges and a solution draft of the concept of DISPRO.