"While people are now using peer-to-peer (P2P) applications for various processes, such as file sharing and video streaming, many research and engineering issues still need to be tackled in order to further advance P2P technologies. Peer-to-Peer Computing: Applications, Architecture, Protocols, and Challenges provides comprehensive theoretical and practical coverage of the major features of contemporary P2P systems and examines the obstacles to further success.Setting the stage for understanding important research issues in P2P systems, the book first introduces various P2P network architectures. It then details the topology control research problem as well as existing technologies for handling topology control issues. The author describes novel and interesting incentive schemes for enticing peers to cooperate and explores recent innovations on trust issues. He also examines security problems in a P2P network. The final chapter addresses the future state of the field. Throughout the text, the highly popular P2P IPTV application, PPLive, is used as a case study to illustrate the practical aspects of the concepts covered.Addressing the unique challenges of P2P systems, this book presents practical applications of recent theoretical results in P2P computing. It also stimulates further research on critical issues, including performance and security problems"--

"Preface Peer-to-peer computing, at least on a conceptual level, is a genuine paradigm shift--intelligence is at the edge, computing is completely decentralized, and the network is just there to knit the distributed intelligence together. Indeed, with advancements in hardware technology, proliferation of the open source development culture, and abundant information at our fingertips, computing power and user competence at the edge of the network has risen to an unprecedented level. Thus, devices at the edge (not restricted to desktop PCs) can congregate and share their resources (computing power, file data, etc.) to provide services to participating users in a self-sufficient manner, without the need of dedicated servers. With potentially up to millions of machines participating simultaneously (e.g., when some hot events are occurring), the aggregated computing resources can dwarf any powerful server farm. Well, well, well, ...these are "conceptual level" thinking as of now. There are still many road-blocks to such a vision, even though we do see millions of machines working together in a P2P manner (e.g., streaming live video events). Again, as the old saying goes, the devils are in the details. Thinking of such gigantic scale of sharing computing resources is one thing, while implementing the idea is definitely another. Road-blocks to the grand vision of truly global P2P sharing include architectural maintenance problems arising from the sheer scale of the system, incentives for truthful cooperation, trust among peers when they need to accept data from remote sources, security issues caused by the inevitable existence of malicious users, etc"--