Data-driven coordination in peer-to-peer information systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) has recently emerged as a promising model for supporting scalable networks composed of autonomous and spontaneously cooperating entities. The key concept in P2P is decentralization: the resources, the services, as well as the control are not in charge of specialized nodes in the network, but each node (called peer in this context) is directly involved in the management of all these aspects. Besides the advantages of decentralization (autonomy, adaptability, collaboration, and dinamicity just to mention few of them) one of the main drawbacks is the impossibility to predict the topology of the network, thus leaving at run-time any decision about the management of the interaction among the peers. For this reason, we consider useful to provide the developers of P2P applications with a high-level coordination language to be exploited to program the coordination among the peers. In this paper, we present PeerSpaces, a new data-driven coordination model suitable for P2P net...