Subject: Peer-to-Peer Research Group

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 09:26:44 -0400

A new IRTF research group, P2PRG (Peer-to-Peer Research Group), has begun,
 with the appended charter. Use [email-masked] to subscribe to the
 mailing list.

 - Vern Paxson (IRTF chair)

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 Charter 
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 Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is a way of structuring distributed applications such
 that the individual nodes have symmetric roles. Rather than being divided
 into clients and servers each with quite distinct roles (such as Web clients
 vs. Web servers), in P2P applications a node may act as both a client and
 a server. P2P systems are in general deployable in an ad-hoc fashion,
 without requiring centralized management or control. They can be highly
 autonomous, and can lend themselves to anonymity. Some historical examples
 of P2P systems are USENET servers, built on top of NNTP, and inter-domain
 routing, built on top of BGP.

 A key concept for P2P systems is to permit any two peers to communicate
 with one another in such a way that either ought to be able to initiate
 the contact. As such, P2P is a powerful tool for organizing cooperative
 communities - both in the research and commercial domains - with common
 goals. However, in practice, we find that the research and commercial
 worlds are driven by different needs. The former often focusses on developing
 generalized building blocks that can then be composed to realize P2P systems
 with quantifiable properties. These building blocks sometimes arise out
 of analysis of the deficiencies of existing P2P systems, attempting to
 overcome discovered shortcomings in areas such as peer-node organization,
 content caching and distribution, lookup, search, discovery, routing,
 security and trust. The commercial P2P world, on the other hand, is driven
 by the concerns of time-to-market and viable business models. Many
 commercial systems have little concern for the research issues mentioned
 above, while the short-term concerns of commercial entities are often not
 within the purview of academic research. Such discontinuites in perspective
 have led to a rift between the two communities, bridging which will be of
 significant short- and long-term benefit.

 The P2P Research Group attempts to serve as such a bridge. First, the
 group offers a forum for researchers to explore a broad range of fundamental
 P2P issues such as: peer-node identity, naming, configuration and capabilities;
 P2P network organization and scope; resource discovery, content lookup,
 search and distribution; request routing and operation in the presence of
 mobility; adaptation to expected peer-node instability; monitoring of P2P
 operations; security of P2P systems involving reputation-based trust for
 ad-hoc systems or more centralized, CA-like approaches; etc.

 In addition, as commercial P2P deployment on the Internet has raced ahead
 of research and standards, issues as basic as interoperable, scalable, P2P
 communication protocols have been set aside. There is no foundation upon
 which one can build a unified, P2P network on the Internet: today's P2P
 protocols create disjoint islands of isolated Internet nodes. To this
 end, the research group also emphasizes the following near-term goals:
 classifying the P2P problem space (both currently, and as it evolves) into
 those problems for which there are existing solutions and those for which
 solutions require longer-term development; developing descriptive model(s)
 of peer-node organization whose interpretation can be applied to these
 solutions; articulating the scope as to what sort of P2P applications the
 models encompass and what sort they do not; understanding the unique
 security-related problems and opportunities P2P systems pose; exploring
 interfaces to IETF protocols to realize the models; and offering input to
 the IETF as a starting place for possible groups standardizing new protocols
 that are useful in building P2P applications.