P2P Networks


by Jennifer Bailey - Date: 2007-01-08 - Word Count: 323 Share This!

P2P (peer to peer) networks can be classified broadly into two categories, pure and hybrid. Pure P2P networks have peers as both client and server, and do not have either a central server to manage the network, or central router. The hybrid P2P network, on the other hand, has a central server that has information on peers and provides that information on request, and holds peers responsible for hosting and sharing the resources.

One of the biggest advantages of P2P networks is that all its users provide resources, including bandwidth, computing power, and storage space. Thus, as users log in and the demand on the system increases, the total system capacity also increases. However, this is not true of a client-server architecture which has a fixed set of servers, and adding more clients means slower data transfer for all users.

Moreover, the distributed nature of P2P networks (Hybrid P2P networks) also increases network robustness in case of failures caused by replicating data over multiple peers. In pure P2P systems peers can find data without relying on a centralized index server. Thus, in the latter case, the single point of failure is eliminated from the system. Also, of late, P2P networks are used to deal other disciplines which have large datasets. One such discipline is bioinformatics, where P2P networks are used to run large programs which carry out tests for identifying drug candidates.

However, most P2P networks are under constant attack for various reasons. The most common examples are, poisoning attacks - which provides files with contents different from its description; polluting attacks - which inserts "bad" chunks/packets into a valid file existing on the network; defection attacks - which happens when users or software that make use of the network do not contribute resources to it; and inserting viruses to data that is being downloaded.

Thus, while P2P networks are of immense significance to many, one needs to be careful from the constant attacks that keep happening on these networks.


Related Tags: p2p, p2p downloads, p2p applications, free p2p

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