Distributed hybrid P2P networking systems

Welcome to the special issue of Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications. This issue contains a collection of the best papers out of various authors who have been submitted to this special issue. Most multimedia-based content service environments are embedded in a large-capacity server and adopt the client–server model. In such a model, excessive load on the server can slow down or break the network. This problem can be solved by applying a peer-to-peer (P2P) network in a distributed environment for smoother sharing and distribution of resources. Depending on the existence of an index server, the P2P models are categorized as hybrid peer-to-peer and pure peer-to-peer networks. A hybrid P2P network is one that has an index server containing information on the locations of resources at the center, and which uses the index server for search. A pure P2P network is one that directly executes the search process among hosts without a server between the hosts [9–11]. The main goal of this issue is to bring together researchers and practitioners in areas of media streaming, multicasting and multimedia delivery, P2P file sharing to share their visions, research achievements and solutions, to resolve the challenge issues and to establish worldwide cooperative researches and developments. This will give an opportunity to push further the discussion upon the potential distributed hybrid networking systems acrossmany communities. Some of these research areas are listed below.