Legitimate Peer to Peer Network Applications: Beyond File and Music Swapping

• The book examines the different legitimate applications used over a peer-to-peer network (p2p)
• The material examines the design and development of novel applications designed to leverage the distributed nature of peer-to-peer environments
• Goes beyond the most popular application of file-sharing (including sharing of video and audio files) and discusses the many different applications
• Compares traditional and peer-to-peer infrastructure and discusses merits and demerits of each approach from a business perspective

Peer-to-peer networks, such as those used for instant messaging, search engines, and data storage, have gotten a bad reputation because of legal and ethical questions about swapping copyrighted material on the Internet. The manager of the policy and networking group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York describes the architecture of the hardware and software behind such networks, and defends the development of legitimate applications utilizing their assets of decentralization and resiliency. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

DINESH C. VERMA, PhD, is Manager of the Policy and Networking Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, New York. He received his doctorate from University of California, Berkeley, and holds more than fourteen patents in the area of computer networking. Dr. Verma is the author of Content Distribution Networks: An Engineering Approach (published by Wiley).