The Peer-to-peer Architecture

In this chapter, we look at the general architecture of a peer-topeer system and contrast it with the traditional client-server architecture that is ubiquitous in current computing systems. We then compare the relative merits and demerits of each of these approaches toward building a distributed system. We begin the chapter with a discussion of the client-server and peer-to-peer computing architectures. The subsequent subsections look at the base components that go into making a peer-topeer application, finally concluding with a section that compares the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches.