Peer-to-peer, P2P, computer systems became infamous as the architecture that allowed users all over the world to share digital content, music, videos, software, much of which was “pirated” or distributed in breach of copyright laws. However, as with most inventions, there are always illicit and legitimate applications.
As the concept spread, so it became obvious that the benefits of a network where each node is a peer on a distributed unfixed network infrastructure could be used to reduce the burden on centralized servers in terms of computing power needed by applications, communications protocols, and storage. Indeed, many cloud-based applications utilize P2P frameworks to share the processing and storage loads so that increasingly powerful servers and bigger data storage facilities are no longer necessary for a wide range of applications.
Of course, P2P is not perfect. Typical systems can suffer from unreliable network transfers and unstable availability of data files. A new approach to circumvent these problems is outlined in the International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations.
Hong He of the School of Computer and Communication at the Hunan Institute of Engineering in Xiangtan City, Hunan Province, China, has proposed a new type of P2P-based storage framework that has a set of “virtual” peers. This improves the reliability of networking transfers and storage by exploiting network coding technology. His study of the new system reveals it to be capable of achieving better tradeoffs between reliability and efficiency. Indeed, the system “outperforms the existing solutions in terms of many performance metrics, including data availability, resource utilisation, and communication cost,” He says.
He, H. (2020) ‘A reliable peer-to-peer storage framework based on virtual peers model’, Int. J. Networking and Virtual Organisations, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp.129–146.