CCS (Peer 2 Peer Research)

A peer-to-peer network is a network that has lots of single computers of participants all sharing files amongst each other. Audio, video, programs or anything data is shared amongst all the partipants on the peer-to-peer network. There are equal peer nodes on a pure peer-to-peer network that act as clients and servers to the other nodes on the network. client-servermodel where communication is usually to and from a central server. Usenet news servers were probably the first widespread type of p2p network, which was used to communicate articles. Napster, OpenNAP, or IRC use a client-server structure for some tasks such as searching, and a peer-to-peer structure for others. Networks such as Gnutella or Freenet use a peer-to-peer structure for all purposes, and are sometimes referred to as true peer-to-peer networks, although Gnutella is greatly facilitated by directory servers that inform peers of the network addresses of other peers. The peer-to-peer structure embodies one of the key technical concepts of the internet. More recently, the concept has achieved recognition in the general public in the context of the absence of central indexing servers in architectures used for exchanging multimedia files.


The classification of a network is determined due to these criteria:

Pure peer-to-peer:
* Peers act as equals, merging the roles of clients and server
* There is no central server managing the network
* There is no central router

Hybrid peer-to-peer:
* Has a central server that keeps information on peers and responds to requests for that information.
* Peers are responsible for hosting available resources (as the central server does not have them), for letting the central server know what resources they want to share, and for making its shareable resources available to peers that request it.
* Route terminals are used addresses, which are referenced by a set of indices to obtain an absolute address.


For a peer-to-peer network to be successful all the clients that operate on the system all provide resources, including bandwidth, storage space, and computing power. The total capacity of the system increases with each participant on the system, offering more nodes. There is legal controversy over the sharing of files through a peer-to-peer network as many music and data files are subject to copyright.