Peer to Peer Networking - Bittorrent focused

“The emergence of peer-to-peer computing signifies a revolution in connectivity that will be as profound to the Internet of the future as Mosaic was to the Web of the past” - Patrick Gelsinger - CEO OF Intel.

Recent times peer to peer networking got lot of attention due to a battle in movie and music industry. But fun fact is it is not a new tech.

By definition, it is a communication model between two or more parties(a computer in a network for example), where each party has same capabilities and either of them can initiate a session to communicate. It is an alternative to traditional client server architecture, where there may be only one or a cluster of servers and multiple clients connected to it. The concept of P2P networking traces back to 1960's where the early adoption of Internet (ARPANET) dated with. It was a p2p network that day where all the peers were equally treated. To be clear, DNS is a blended example for both P2P as well as traditional data ownership models.

Now, as we are heading towards distributed systems based model, it is also a p2p based architecture, if the participants in the system shares their own hardware resources such as processing power, storage, network bandwidth, printers etc. These shared resources are necessary to provide the service and content offered by the network such as shared printing, shared file storage services like NFS etc, and accessible by the peers directly without a need for an intermediate entity. They are called as resource providers as well as resource requesters.

Peer to Peer Network Topologies.

1. Pure P2P:

In pure p2p network, peers are the only entities allowed. Any distributed architecture that can be classified as Pure P2P if it is a peer to peer network and if any single entity can be removed from the network without disturbing the traffic flow.

2. Hybrid P2P:

It is a different form of pure p2p network with central entities different from peers are involved in the network. Any distributed architecture that can be classified as hybrid P2P if it is a peer to peer network and a central entity is required to provide parts of networked services between peers.

In the next article we will see about what is Bittorrent protocol all about.