Several structured peer-to-peer networks have been created to solve the scalability problem of previous peer-to-peer systems such as Gnutella and Napster. These peer-to-peer networks which support distributed hash table functionality construct a sort of structured overlay network, which can cause a topology mismatch between the overlay and the underlying physical network. To solve this mismatch...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have received a lot of attention due to the popularity of applications such as SETI, Napster, Gnutella, and Morpheus. The P2P systems present tremendous challenges in searching data items among the numerous host nodes. While search has been studied in a similar but different context, i.e., parallel and distributed database systems, the large scale and dynamic membersh...

In a peer-to-peer system, there is no centralized control or hierarchical organization: each peer is equivalent in functionality and cooperates with other peers in order to solve a collective task. Such systems have evolved from simple keyword-based peer-to-peer file sharing systems like Napster and Gnutella to schema-based peer data management systems like Edutella [3] or Piazza [2], which han...

Projects developing infrastructure for the pooling of distributed resources (data, storage, or computation) [1, 2] often assume that resource owners have committed their resources and that the chief task is to integrate and use them efficiently. Such projects frequently ignore the question of whether individual resource owners are willing to share their personal resources for the overall good o...

We have come a long way since industrial society, where specialization and monotone labor was part of a bigger distributed cognitive system. Today society rewards creativity, ideas and versatility. Teaming up with others for additional competence is a natural way to get this process started. One and the same person could come up with ideas, create and test them, and eventually launch them. Dema...

describe new technologies. Of course, these dreams have never quite come about as planned. Instead of a smart machine seeking out music tuned to my tastes, I still have only a small number of choices on my radio dial. And ever since Napster started filtering, sharing music on the Internet has become increasingly difficult. One thing that underlies these ideas is their dependency on metadata, or...

Since the launch of Napster in June 1999, peer-to-peer technology (P2P) has become synonymous with file sharing applications that are the bane of the recording industry due to copyright infringements and consequent revenue losses. P2P promised a revolution in business computing which has not arrived. It has become synonymous with illegal file sharing and copyright violations. Meanwhile the info...

Overlay networks have received a lot of attention due to the recent wide-spread use of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications such as SETI, Napster, Gnutella, and Morpheus. Through replications at numerous peers, digital content can be distributed or exchanged with high resilience and availability. However, existing P2P applications incur excessive overhead on network traffic. For example, Gnutella, w...

The rise of peer-to-peer networks starting with Napster in 1999 and later KaZaA and eMule had a substantial impact on the online distribution of media content. Millions of users at any given point of time illegally offer copyright protected files and internalize the cost of their behavior. Whereas it is easy to explain why users download files, it remains an open question as to why they provide...