The power of P2P beyond file sharing

Summary form only given. Peer-to-peer (P2P) model has been actively and widely used for file sharing in Internet. While many research efforts have been made to improve its performance, some organizations have expressed their serious concerns to P2P applications in Internet, such as copyright violations, information leaking, and inefficient usage of Internet resources. Instead of presenting the subjective views to these problems, the author addresses the power of P2P beyond file sharing: its effectiveness to balance the supply and demand of network bandwidths and storage access latencies in Internet and distributed systems. The author present several system designs and implementations guided by P2P principle, including network RAM, cooperative caching in network file systems, multi-level buffer caching, and streaming proxy caching. These cases show that P2P has quietly, inevitably, and effectively used in the design and deployment in inherent and distributed systems.