What is peer-to-peer networking?
Peer-to-peer is an approach to computer networking in which all computers share equivalent responsibility for processing data. Peer-to-peer networking differs from client server networking, in which certain devices have responsibility for providing or “serving” data, while other devices consume or otherwise act as “clients” of those servers.
Peer to peer is an approach to computer networking where all computers share equivalent responsibility for processing data. Peer-to-peer networking (also known simply as peer networking) differs from client-server networking, where certain devices have responsibility for providing or “serving” data and other devices consume or otherwise act as “clients” of those servers.
The computers which comprise a network are called peers. In peer-to-peer networking, the resources of each peer are shared by all of the peers on the network. These resources might be hard drives, CD-rom drives, printers or Internet access. Also, in peer-to-peer networks, each peer has equivalent client and server capabilities and communication and data sharing occurs directly between computers, rather than through an intermediary computer. There are some drawbacks to a peer-to-peer configuration, including the following: many peers share many resources, which can be very difficult to manage; peer-to-peer networking allows data sharing but only limited (DOS-based) program sharing; there is very little security on a peer workstation and data can easily be compromised when housed there; and data backup procedures are cumbersome on these networks, since data is housed on many workstations.
Peer-to-peer networking is a serverless networking technology that allows several network devices to share resources and communicate directly with each other. This technology is available for Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) and later clients that run the Advanced Networking Pack for the Peer-to-Peer Infrastructure. The Peer-to-Peer Infrastructure is a set of networking APIs to help you develop decentralized networking applications that use the collective power of computers on a network. For example, peer-to-peer applications can be collaborative communications, content distribution technologies, and so on. The Peer-to-Peer Infrastructure provides a solid networking infrastructure so that you can concentrate on developing applications, because the infrastructure is developed for you.
A Peer-to-Peer network is any network that provides an abstraction of the IP addresses of computers that want to exchange data (1). So, the term “Peer-to-Peer” is more about how the different computers communicate with each other within a network than about the network structure(2). The abstraction of the IP addresses can be made by identifying the users by a number or name that is not related to the IP address [1] of the computer that is used. For example, your name in a chat room (IRC) identifies you, and other users in the chat room can write messages to you through the server without having to know your IP address. Similarly, your ICQ [2] number remains the same, whatever is your IP address, or even the computer that you are using. The ICQ server is doing all the abstraction needed. Thus other ICQ users can know if you are online knowing only your ICQ number, since it is the ICQ server that will do the translation between the ICQ number and the IP address.
