Why P2P?

The peer-to-peer (P2P) software architecture has been instrumental in changing the landscape of the music industry. The drive by the music industry to have the free Napster file sharing service outlawed in 2004 to protect their intellectual capital points to the negative impact on their revenue. However, groups like Arctic Monkeys have seen it as an opportunity to deliberately share their demo CDs free of charge to build fan base with a little marketing outlay.

In pure P2P architecture all the participating computers have equal roles and can act as both client and server. There is no concept of centralised server so there is no single point of failure. Without any centralised server, the P2P application will keep track of users with installed software, locate them and search for the files in their P2P storage area. A hybrid P2P like Napster had a centralised server keeping an index of all the available files and the currently signed on users with their available files to facilitate searches. The essential feature of P2P file transfer is that once a host server has been established which has the required file, the communication is directly between the requesting client and the responding host. The network doesn’t suffer from degraded performance when more clients are connected as in traditional client-server architecture; as each new client brings its own resources (ie storage, bandwidth and CPU processing power) to the table to increase network capacity. Also the files are available from a number of connected clients so there is potential for selecting from the most responsive host and there is built-in fault tolerance as the files are available on a number of hosts.