From the editors: peer-to-peer community: looking beyond the legacy of Napster and Gnutella

Owing to the popularity of Napster and its successors, including Gnutella, Kazaa, Morpheus, and E-Donkey, file sharing has become by far the killer P2P application. Its popularity almost eclipses other P2P applications. Moreover, much P2P research has targeted the challenges facing these popular file-sharing networks. P2P applications started to use superpeers (a set of more powerful nodes in a heterogeneous network) to transform the existing flat topology of these networks into a hierarchical one. Superpeers are considered faster and more reliable than normal peers and take on server-like responsibilities. The field of P2P has yet to realize its full potential in the application domain.