Interoperability of peer-to-peer file sharing protocols

TLDR

Peer‑to‑peer file sharing has sparked widespread debate, with Freenet, Gnutella, and Napster being the most popular systems that each employ distinct protocols with varying characteristics. The authors aim to analyze the peer‑registry, query, and content‑sharing methods of these three P2P systems and to propose a gateway‑based framework that integrates their protocols. They examine the protocols’ methodologies for peer registration, query handling, and content distribution, and design a P2P gateway framework to unify the disparate protocols.

Abstract

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing software has brought a hot discussion on P2P file sharing among all businesses. Freenet, Gnutella, and Napster are the three most popular P2P file sharing applications. They use three distinct protocols and these protocols come with different characteristics. In this paper, we discuss the protocols of these P2P file sharing applications, in terms of the methodologies used for peer registry, query and content sharing. In order to maximize the benefit of P2P file sharing application that is to facilitate file sharing among various P2P file sharing applications, we propose a framework to integrate various P2P file sharing protocols using P2P gateway in this paper.