The success of a P2P file-sharing network highly depends on the scalability and versatility of its search mechanism. Two particularly desirable search features are scope (ability to find infrequent items) and support for partial-match queries (queries that contain typos or include a subset of keywords). While centralized-index architectures (such as Napster) can support both these features, exi...

In the Internet and Communication Technology (ICT) field, sharing and distribution of information is very important. Various mechanisms and techniques are used to manage information; one of these is based on peer-to-peer networks. In today’s world and in the near future, the exchange and distribution of information will be a very important aspect in the workplace and in daily life. Consequently...

The success of a P2P file-sharing network highly depends on the scalability and versatility of its search mechanism. Two particularly desirable search features are scope (ability to find infrequent items) and support for partial-match queries (queries that contain typos or include a subset of keywords). While centralized-index architectures (such as Napster) can support both these features, exi...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing, where peers in a community interact directly with each other rather than through intermediary servers, is emerging as a powerful paradigm for collaboration over the Internet. However, this paradigm poses a difficult challenge: how to ensure the harmonious, safe, and secure operation of these communities, particularly if they are large and geographically distributed...

Trace back to 1999: that was the year Napster took the music world by storm. The application brought together millions of music enthusiasts eager to share and download each other's song collections. The ease with which two "peers" could share a file was refreshing. At its peak in early 2000, this rage had resulted in a network of about 60 million Napster users. It was also around this time that...

The primary properties of the existing large scale peer-to-peer system include very high heterogeneity and dynamic nature of the participating peers in the network. Properties of peers such as peer session length, accessible bandwidth, storage space are highly varied with small set of peers controlling large part of the total system resources which results in low performance of the system. The ...

Unstructured P2P systems have gained great popularity in recent years and are currently used by millions of users. One fundamental property of these systems is the lack of structure, which allows decentralized operation and makes it easy for new users to join and participate in the system. However, the lack of structure can also be abused by malicious users. We explore one such attack, that ena...

Peer-to-peer networks are the most popular mechanism for the criminal acquisition and distribution of child pornography (CP). In this paper, we examine observations of peers sharing known CP on the Gnutella and eMule networks, which were collected by law enforcement using forensic tools that we developed. We characterize a year’s worth of network activity and evaluate different strategies for p...

Peer-to-Peer (p2p) networks are being increasingly adopted as an invaluable resource for various music information retrieval (MIR) tasks, including music similarity, recommendation and trend prediction. However, these networks are usually extremely large and noisy, which raises doubts regarding the ability to actually extract sufficiently accurate information. This paper evaluates the applicabi...

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) and Peer-toPeer (P2P) applications are emerging technologies based on the same paradigm: the Peer-to-Peer paradigm. Motivated, respectively, by the necessity of executing applications in environments with no previous infra-structure and the demand for applications that share, in a satisfying manner, files through the Internet, MANETs and P2P applications have bro...