A Scalable Content-Addressable Network (2002)
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@MISC{Ratnasamy02ascalable,
author = {Sylvia Paul Ratnasamy},
title = {A Scalable Content-Addressable Network},
year = {2002}
}
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Abstract
In May 1999, Shawn Fanning, then a freshman at Northeastern University, launched the first "peer-to-peer" or P2P file-sharing application -- Napster. Napster allowed individual end-users (called peers) to share the MP3-encoded music stored on their local computers directly with one another over the Internet. Within a year, Napster had grown to a user population of over 50 Million users making it the fastest growing Internet application to date. Three years later, despite the closure of Napster, the phenomenon of file-sharing continues its dramatic growth and appears set to remain an important feature of the Internet for the forseeable future. The sheer scale of these file-sharing applications make them important in their own right. And yet, as this thesis will argue, P2P is much more than just a way to trade MP3s over the Internet. The P2P architecture with its use of low-cost, grass-roots resources and its decentralized nature that does not rely on any form of centrally managed infrastructure, represents a significant departure from the client-server architecture of the Web. These unique characteristics, we believe, allow P2P systems to support the rapid and low-cost deployment of powerful large-scale applications in a manner that would not be possible with the current architecture of the Web.
