80 Peer-to-Peer Computing
conforms nicely with the simulation findings by Jun and Ahamad [Jun and
Ahamad, 2005] who observed that in BitTorrent, free-riders are not penalized
adequately while contributors are not rewarded sufficiently.
5.2.1.2 Hierarchical P2P Systems
In some situations, the P2P network may be structured in a hierarchical
manner so that some specialized ma chines (called “super-peers”) can take up
a more impo rtant role for handling resource management tasks s uch as request
forwarding and routing, directory listing, etc.
Singh et al. [Singh et al., 2003] proposed a super-peer-based scheme. Sp ecif-
ically, Singh et al. studied the impacts of super-peers in a P2P file sharing
network. Simply put, a super-peer is a special network node