Towards adaptive, resilient and self-organizing peer-to-peer systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are characterized by decentralized control, large scale and extreme dynamism of their operating environment. Developing applications that can cope with these characteristics requires a paradigm shift, placing adaptation, resilience and self-organization as primary concerns. In this note, we argue that complex adaptive systems (CAS), which have been used to explain certain biological, social and economical phenomena, can be the basis of a programming paradigm for P2P applications. In order to pursue this idea, we are developing Anthill, a framework to support the design, implementation and evaluation of P2P applications based on ideas such as multi-agent and evolutionary programming borrowed from CAS. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.