Structured P2P Networks in Mobile and Fixed Environments

Abstract – Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks and their applications gain increasing importance in today’s Internet, as already today the majority of IP traffic is caused by P2P applications. Since the upcoming of Napster a lot of research has been done in this area producing interesting and promising results. Still, growing demands like less data rate consumption, faster and more reliable search responses and the development of new applications engage many researchers worldwide. In this tutorial we therefore provide an overview about the area of P2P networking, its basic methods and a classification into unstructured and structured P2P networks. However the focus of this work is put on structured P2P networks, for which we explain in detail the most important routing algorithms. Based on this overview we can provide a discussion of the major advantages and disadvantages of the different P2P approaches, focusing especially on the applicability of P2P networks in heterogeneous environments. Index terms – Structured and Unstructured Peer-to-Peer, Distributed Hash tables, signaling efficiency, cross layer communication, heterogeneous networks.