Innovations in Peer-to-Peer Communications

In the last 2 years, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communications has gone from a completely new topic to a popular mechanism for use in personal communications. We proposed the first standards-based P2P communications system, SOSIMPLE, and have been focused on addressing a number of issues for such systems. In particular, we have been exploring issues that have limited implementation and deployment of these systems, including security, distributed storage of offline messages, protocol standardization, NAT traversal, and defining P2P routing mechanisms optimized for communications, rather than file sharing. In this paper, we outline some of these issues, discuss possible solutions to address them, and discuss work in these areas to date.