About this report

The initial ideas for this thesis, and hence this report, appeared during the summer the year 2002. Companies in Umeå at this time did not have much need for students participating in their work, by doing a master thesis at their company. Only a few years earlier this situation was the completely opposite, but times had changed.

After looking around at various companies for an interesting thesis proposal I, the author, decided to take control of the situation. Finding a suitable topic was the next necessary step and peer-to-peer networking was an appealing area. After looking at various sources of information on peer-to-peer the most interesting aspects of the area appeared to be the performance of peer-to-peer services. Since most users view of peer-to-peer is synonymous with file sharing applications it felt important to present other available services using similar techniques as well, although file sharing would make up a substantial part of the thesis.

Identifying flaws in the usage of network resources and possible solutions to these flaws would be the major part of the thesis. This included investigating existing protocols, such as Gnutella, in theory and practice. Investigating alternative solutions for addressing and querying with the purpose to minimize wasting network resources was to be an important aspect of this thesis.

The practical aspects of the thesis were not really that well defined in the beginning, but became more obvious as the work progressed.