Peer-to-peer technologies (or P2P for short) have broken through in recent years as an attractive alternative to the traditional client-server-based architectures and systems. A lot of the attention paid to peer-to-peer systems has been caused by the widespread use of P2P file sharing networks, where (often illegal) media content is being distributed. Recently deployed peer-to-peer systems howe...

This paper provides a brief introduction to peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. Basic definitions and characteristics of P2P systems are described in Section 1. A comparison of a two related paradigms: P2P and Grid computing is also given. Section 2 classifies P2P substrates into two categories: structured and unstructured. Description of each category along with some examples is provided. A wide range...

We consider the problem of designing an overlay network and routing mechanism that permits finding resources efficiently in a peer-to-peer system. We argue that many existing approaches to this problem can be modeled as the construction of a random graph embedded in a metric space whose points represent resource identifiers, where the probability of a connection between two nodes depends only o...

Peer-to-peer applications (P2P) are no longer limited to home users, and start being accepted in academic and corporate environments. While file sharing and instant messaging applications are the most traditional examples, they are no longer the only ones benefiting from the potential advantages of P2P networks. For example, network file storage, data transmission, distributed computing, and co...

The Special Issue of the Journal of Information Technology Management (JITM) is publishing very selective papers on information management, technology in higher education, integrated systems, enterprise management, cultural thoughts, strategic contributions, management information systems, and cloud computing. We received numerous papers for this special issue but after an extensive pe...