Modeling P2P networks

Slashdot readers discuss a project posted on ececs.uc.edu in which master’s degree student Mihajlo A. Jovanovic uses Gnutella as a case study to analyse and model P2P networks. “My primary research interest is scalability issues in peer-to-peer computing networks. Although P2P computing has existed for some time as a basis for network applications such as FTP, Telnet, instant messaging, ICQ, and Microsoft’s MSN Messenger Service and NetMeeting, recently it has managed to capture a lot of attention. Indeed, the sudden emergence of new applications like SETI@Home, Groove, Napster, mobile communications, and Gnutella is threatening to replace the traditional client-server architecture of the web and bring rise to a new era in personal computing. My recent work has focused on Gnutella as a model of a purely distributed computing system. Gnutella allows users to share information by directly connecting to each other forming a high-level network.”