A framework for peer-to-peer service interaction

Although structured/unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) algorithms proliferate in recent years, building P2P application is still complex and time-consuming due to inadequate infrastructure support. On the other hand, service-oriented architecture significantly reduces developing complexity by further decoupling dependent components. Based on the idea of using services as fundamental elements for developing P2P applications, we propose a P2P service framework to facilitate P2P application development. The framework chooses eQuus as the DHT implementation for the reason of robustness and integrates with OSGi to maximize its usability. Group communication helps the framework to achieve replication with almost free cost. Pull and push based service discovery mechanism enables applications unaware of the underlying remote distribution. Through relaying mechanism, our framework is able to traverse NATs. Based on our framework, we also implemented QChat - a pure P2P chat application.