Summary of requirements

The goal of this thesis is to present a thorough study of peer-to-peer services. The study should present the flaws in some of todays services and suggest improvements. File sharing, the most well known service, will be the service receiving the most attention. The requirements of the thesis can be summarized as follows.

• Investigate existing peer-to-peer services and analyze their performance, especially file sharing systems should be considered.
• Identify the key components in a generic peer-to-peer system, their responsibilities and interaction.
• Design a framework from which efficient peer-to-peer systems can be built.
• Investigate file sharing and discuss protocol performance related topics such as:
  • caching methods
  • hierarchical aggregation
  • specialized directories
• Look at other applications and frameworks for peer-to-peer services and see how they can benefit from the earlier work.