Peer to Peer: Collaboration and Sharing over the Internet

Specific Architectures

This section describes how some common p2p-capable implementations, especially those built into operating systems, have applied one or another of the general architectural models. We examine how closely each implementation adheres to a given model, and of particular interest is to note how each has tried to solve issues relating to user convenience, reliability, scale, and so on.

These examples are intended as illustrative of concept, not as exhaustive analysis, and they mainly provide a general backdrop to the detailed analysis of more recent technologies in Part II. Although capable of creating legitimate and often perfectly adequate p2p solutions in the LAN context, they aren’t in themselves necessarily practical solutions ...