Speaking of Standards

What are the components of a “peer-to-peer (P2P)” network? What are the different types currently available? When does it make sense to consider using a P2P architecture?

Given the intense amount of interest in P2P networking these days, the Internet Architecture Board recently came out with a new Internet-Draft, draft-iab-p2p-archs, on “Peer-to-peer (P2P) Architectures” that aims to help provide answers to these types of questions. Here’s the introduction:

P2P (Peer-to-peer) systems have received a great deal of attention in the last few years. A large number of scientific publications investigate different aspects of P2P systems, several scientific conferences explicitly focus on P2P networking, and there is an IRTF (Internet Research Task Force) Research Group (RG) on P2P systems (the Peer-to-Peer RG). There are also several commercial and non- commercial applications that use P2P principles running on the Internet. Some of these P2P applications are among the most widely used applications on the Internet at present.

However, despite all the above, engineers designing systems or developing protocol specifications do not have a common understanding of P2P systems. More alarming is the fact that many people in the telecom and datacom industries believe that P2P is synonymous with illegal activity, such as the illegal exchange of content over the Internet or P2P botnets.

The goal of this document is to discuss the tradeoffs involved in deciding whether a particular application can be best designed and implemented using a P2P paradigm or a different model (e.g., a client-server paradigm). The document also aims to provide architectural guidelines to assist in making such decisions. This document provides engineers with a high-level understanding of what defines a P2P system, what types of P2P systems exist, the characteristics that can be expected from such systems, and what types of applications can be implemented using P2P technologies. Such understanding is essential in order to appreciate the tradeoffs referred to above. In addition, we stress the importance of the fact that P2P systems can be used to implement perfectly legitimate applications and business models by providing several examples throughout the document.

Given my own long-standing personal interest in P2P networks (some of which I’ve written about here), I was pleased to see this document come out. Anything that helps improve the overall understanding out there of P2P systems is, in my opinion, a good thing.

The draft is still undergoing some revisions (and I know the authors would welcome further comments) and I believe a new version will be coming out soon. The latest version should always be able to be found at:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-iab-p2p-archs

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3. P2PSIP and pushing voice down into local clouds…
4. Updated P2PSIP Security Overview Internet-Draft posted
5. New version of P-Charge-Info (08) Internet Draft available

Tags: IETF, P2P

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