Data Management in Large-scale P2P Systems1

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing offers new opportunities for building highly distributed data systems. Unlike client-server computing, P2P can operate without central coordination and offer important advantages such as a very dynamic environment where peers can join and leave the network at any time; direct and fast communication between peers, and scale up to large number of peers. However, most deployed P2P systems have severe limitations: file-level sharing, read-only access, simple search and poor scaling. In this paper, we discuss the issues of providing high-level data management services (schema, queries, replication, availability, etc.) in a P2P system. This implies revisiting distributed database technology in major ways. We illustrate how we address some of these issues in the APPA data management system under development in the Atlas group.