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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2056–2061Cite as

Peer to Peer Overlay Networks: Structure, Routing and Maintenance

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Definition

A peer-to-peer overlay network is a computer network built on top of an existing network, usually the Internet. Peer-to-peer overlay networks enable participating peers to find the other peers not by the IP addresses but by the specific logical identifiers known to all peers. Usually, peer-to-peer overlays have the advantage over the traditional client-server systems because of their scalability and lack of single-point-of-failure. Peer-to-peer overlays are commonly used for file sharing and realtime data streaming.

Historical Background

The rise of the Internet brought the first instances of peer-to-peer overlays like the Domain Name System (DNS), the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), USENET and more recently IPv6, which were needed to facilitate the operation of the Internet itself. These peer-to-peer overlays were intrinsically decentralized and represented symmetric nature of the Internet, where every node in the overlay had equal status and assumed cooperative...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. EPFL, Lausanne,  , Switzerland

    Wojciech Galuba & Sarunas Girdzijauskas

Authors
  1. Wojciech Galuba
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  2. Sarunas Girdzijauskas
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Galuba, W., Girdzijauskas, S. (2009). Peer to Peer Overlay Networks: Structure, Routing and Maintenance. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1215

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