Motivation

The term "Peer-to-Peer" has drawn much attention in the last few years; particularly for applications providing file-sharing, but distributed computing and Internet-based telephony have also been successfully implemented. Within these applications the Peer-to-Peer concept is mainly used to share files, i.e., the exchange of diverse media data, like music, films, and programs. The growth in the usage of these applications is enormous and even more rapid than that of the World Wide Web. Also, much of the attention focused on early Peer-to-Peer systems concerned copyright issues of shared content.

But, the concept of Peer-to-Peer architectures offers many other interesting and significant research avenues as the research community has repeatedly pointed out. Due to its main design principle of being completely decentralized and self-organizing –- as opposed to the Internet's traditional Client-Server paradigm –- the Peer-to-Peer concept emerges as a major design pattern for future applications, system components, and infrastructural services, particularly with regard to scalability and resilience.

The perspective of the Peer-to-Peer concept offers new challenges, e.g., building scalable and resilient distributed systems and a fast deployment of new services. Based on the decentralized Peer-to-Peer approach, new Internet services can be deployed on demand and without spending time-consuming efforts in the process of product placement for the appropriate market, community, or company.

Given this persistent and long-term development, there are three fundamental challenges for current and future Internet applications:

• Scalability is of utmost importance in order to cope with user bases and resource consumption of applications (in terms of bandwidth, storage, processing, etc.) growing by several orders of magnitude.
• Only through security and reliability it is possible to maintain the availability of centralized services in the face of distributed denial-of-service attacks. Data privacy and censorresistance are also of growing concern.
• Flexibility and quality of service allow the rapid deployment of new technologies throughout the Internet, e.g. to realize long-promised multicast and host mobility features.

The Peer-to-Peer paradigm shows the potential to meet these challenges. Peer-to-Peer systems share distributed resources and address services based on content rather than location. Without the necessity for central entities, they organize themselves into cooperating infrastructures of symmetric peers. The two approaches of structured vs. unstructured P2P systems allow for different and sometimes complementary trade-offs and still bear a wide range of ongoing and future research in the P2P area.

The goal of the second Dagstuhl seminar on Peer-to-Peer-Systems and –Applications is to assemble researchers being highly active in the area of Peer-to-Peer mechanisms and networking ...

1. to reflect on recent research activities,
2. to identify future research issues, i.e. major challenges and
3. to strengthen the Peer-to-Peer community in research

Further Information

Information for participants of the Dagstuhl Seminar 06131 "Peer-to-Peer Systems and Applications" (March 26th-29th, 2006) are available here. Some of these informations are restricted to participants (required login information will be sent by mail).

After the seminar, results, talks, and other information will be made available on this page.

Past Seminars and Meetings

• Dagstuhl Seminar 04111: "Peer-to-Peer Systems and Applications", April 2004
• GI/ITG Workshop "Peer-to-Peer Systeme und Anwendungen", Kaiserslautern, March 2005
• KuVS Fachgespräch: "Qualität in Peer-to-Peer Netzen", TU Darmstadt, September 2003