Peer to Peer: Collaboration and Sharing over the Internet

Chapter 8. Distributed Content

An alternative to simply sharing existing content, where users access files made available by local decisions at each individual node of a p2p network, is to introduce network mechanisms to distribute shared storage across the nodes in the network. In other words, no longer is the aggregate content just the sum of the files that each node arbitrarily allows to be shared, but instead a common content published to the network at large.

This distinction can be important in some networks, especially because it decouples content from the requirement that the node that contributed it must be online for others to access it. Nodes contribute publishing, storage and retrieval resources, but they no longer have any explicit ...