A Survey of Data Management in Peer-to-Peer Systems

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems provide a decentralized infrastructure for resource sharing. In particular, file sharing was the initial motivation behind many of the first successful P2P systems. As P2P systems evolve to support sharing of structured and semantically rich data, several data management issues must be addressed. Specifically, P2P systems need to deal with data location, data integration, data querying, and data consistency issues. Data management is further complicated in P2P systems due to the volatility and scale of these systems. In this survey we propose a reference architecture for P2P systems that focuses on the data management activities required to support sharing of structured data. Based on this reference architecture, we present and classify technologies that have been proposed to solve the data management issues particular to P2P systems.