Technical trends in P2P-based communications

This paper outlines and analyses major P2P technologies currently being actively studied at various research organisations or already in use in both business and personal environments. Various technical features of P2P as well as its history and market trends are shown. P2P principles focussing on discovery and network-organisational mechanisms of major P2P systems such as JXTA, SIONet, Freenet, and Chord are first summarised. Also. other technical issues related to delivery, network control, security, digital rights management, and distributed computing are described. Then, P2P technologies to promote next-generation community networks with autonomous and intelligent characteristics are addressed. Based on these. P2P applications are analysed and some examples are shown. Studies of P2P? traffic measurement, which is difficult by using traditional evaluation methods, are taken up to consider total network design in the P2P era.