Collaborative Applications over Peer-to-Peer Systems - Challenges and Solutions

TL;DR

This paper reviews the challenges and solutions in developing collaborative peer-to-peer systems, focusing on resource discovery, matching, security, and open research issues to enhance their effectiveness and adoption.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of current architectures, challenges, and solutions for collaborative P2P systems, highlighting open issues and future research directions.

Findings

Resource discovery solutions vary in efficiency and scalability.

Security and trust are critical for system success.

Open research issues include incentive mechanisms and privacy protection.

Abstract

Emerging collaborative Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems require discovery and utilization of diverse, multi-attribute, distributed, and dynamic groups of resources to achieve greater tasks beyond conventional file and processor cycle sharing. Collaborations involving application specific resources and dynamic quality of service goals are stressing current P2P architectures. Salient features and desirable characteristics of collaborative P2P systems are highlighted. Resource advertising, selecting, matching, and binding, the critical phases in these systems, and their associated challenges are reviewed using examples from distributed collaborative adaptive sensing systems, cloud computing, and mobile social networks. State-of-the-art resource discovery/aggregation solutions are compared with respect to their architecture, lookup overhead, load balancing, etc., to determine their ability to meet the goals and challenges of each critical phase. Incentives, trust, privacy, and security issues are also discussed, as they will ultimately determine the success of a collaborative P2P system. Open issues and research opportunities that are essential to achieve the true potential of collaborative P2P systems are discussed.