Topic 7: Peer to Peer Computing. Introduction

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems enable computers to share information and other resources with their networked peers in large-scale distributed computing environments. The resulting overlay networks are inherently decentralized, selforganizing, and self-coordinating.Well-designed P2P systems should be adaptive to peer arrivals and departures, resilient to failures, tolerant to network performance variations, and scalable to huge numbers of peers (tens of thousands to millions). As P2P research becomes more mature, new challenges emerge to support complex and heterogeneous decentralized environments for sharing and managing data, resources, and knowledge with highly dynamic and unpredictable usage patterns. This topic provides a forum for researchers to present new contributions to P2P systems, technologies, middleware, and applications that address key research issues and challenges.