Investigate existing services

To understand what peer-to-peer is all about it is important to provide a survey of existing services. Since most of the thesis will focus on file sharing, it is the service that will be given the most attention. Several file sharing services and their protocols will be presented. The study of these services will also result in an understanding on what is needed to construct a working file sharing system that uses peer-to-peer technology.

Three protocols have been chosen. Gnutella is a well-known protocol that has received a lot of press and it will also receive attention in this thesis. P-Grid is another protocol that can be used to locate files in a peer-to-peer environment. It uses a distributed search tree and provides some interesting ideas on how protocols can be designed.

Finally FastTrack is a another file sharing protocol that is widely used. It cannot be studied directly since no specification or reasonable documentation is available. Instead a project called giFT that strives to provide a similar protocol known as OpenFT will be investigated along with the giFT project itself.