Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is attracting enormous media attention, spurred by the popularity of file sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella, and Morpheus. The peers are autonomous, or as some call them, first-class citizens. P2P networks are emerging as a new distributed computing paradigm for their potential to harness the computing power of the hosts composing the network and make their under-utilized resources available to others. Although researchers working on distributed computing, multiagent systems, databases and networks have been using similar concepts for a long time, it is...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is currently attracting enormous public attention, spurred by the popularity of file-sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella, and Morpheus. In P2P systems a very large number of autonomous computing nodes, the peers, rely on each other for services. P2P networks are emerging as a new distributed computing paradigm because of their potential to harness the computing power of the hosts composing the network, and because they make their underutilized resources available to each other.

This book brings together three especially commissioned invited...