Peer-to-Peer networking: State of the art and research challenges

The past few years have witnessed the emergence of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems as a means to further facilitate the formation of communities of interest over the Internet in all areas of human life including technical/research, cultural, political, social, entertainment, etc. P2P technologies involve data storage, discovery and retrieval, overlay networks and application-level routing, security and reputation, measurements and management. This tutorial will give an appreciation of the issues and state of the art in Peer-to-Peer Networking. It will introduce the underlying concepts, present existing architectures, highlight the design requirements, discuss the research issues, compare existing approaches, and illustrate the concepts through case studies. The ultimate objective is to provide the tutorial attendees with an in-depth understanding of the issues inherent to the design, deployment and operation of large-scale P2P systems.