Recently, there has been a growing interest in peer-to-peer networks, sparked by the popularity of file sharing applications such as Napster and Gnutella. A typical characteristic of a peer-to-peer system is that all the nodes are equal participants in the network. Gnutella is an example of a ‘pure’ peer-to-peer system, being fully distributed where all nodes are equal and no special nodes with...

Consistent hashing is a special kind of hashing which is useful for certain applications. Originally devised by Karger et. al. at MIT[2] for use in distributed caching, the idea has now been expanded to other areas, most notably peer to peer networking[5][4]. As internet use increases and as distributed systems grow more prevalent (ie, Napster clones), consistent hashing could play an increasin...

A growing number of systems on the Internet create what we call information pools, or collections of online information goods for public, club or private consumption. Examples of information pools include collaborative editing websites (e.g. Wikipedia), peer-to-peer file sharing networks (e.g., Napster), multimedia contribution sites (e.g. YouTube), and amorphous collections of commentary (e.g....

How would you like to share files with another user without having to explicitly place them in a designated external location? The recent successes of (and controversies surrounding) Napster, Gnutella, and FreeNet have drawn attention to peer-to-peer computing, which allows precisely such interactions between information and service providers and their customers. Let’s take a brief look at peer...

The Internet’s phenomenal impact and subsequent growth stemmed primarily from the open, public, worldwide networking it offers. Most current applications, however, use client-server technologies that incorporate networking as an ancillary, value-added feature. Peer-to-peer computing offers a radically new way of isolating and focusing on the networking aspect as the business model’s mainstay. A...

This paper presents the architecture of a novel Peer to Peer (P2P) workflow management system. The proposed P2P architecture is based on concepts such as a Web Workflow Peers Directory (WWPD) and Web Workflow Peer (WWP). The WWPD is an active directory system that maintains a list of all peers (WWPs) that are available to participate in Web workflow processes. Similar to P2P systems such as Nap...

The Internet has experienced two major revolutions. The first was the emergence of the World Wide Web, which catapulted the Internet from being a scientific and academic network to becoming part of the societal infrastructure. The second revolution was the appearance of the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications, spear-headed by Napster. The popularity of P2P networking has lead to a dramatic increase...

The Internet’s phenomenal impact and subsequent growth stemmed primarily from the open, public, worldwide networking it offers. Most current applications, however, use client-server technologies that incorporate networking as an ancillary, value-added feature. Peer-to-peer computing offers a radically new way of isolating and focusing on the networking aspect as the business model’s mainstay. A...

o timo hannay Nature Publishing Group ne of the most articulate of web commentators, Clay Shirky, put it best. During his " Lessons from Napster " talk at the O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer Conference in 2001, he invited his audience to consider the infamous prediction of IBM's creator, Thomas Watson, that the world market for computers would plateau at somewhere around five [1]. No doubt some of the pe...

This paper analyzes the impact of music file sharing on CD purchases. Traditionally , two arguments are opposed concerning the impact of the music file sharing on CD sales. On the one hand, MP3s downloads only reduces sales of legitimate. On the other hand, consumption of free MP3s could lead people to buy CD which they would never have bought otherwise (the “sampling effect”). Because the cour...