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Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject Computer Science - Internet, New Technologies, grade: 2, University of Duisburg-Essen (Lehrstuhl Technik der Rechnernetze), 22 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Peer-to-Peer (P2P) focuses on the idea of sharing any kind of resource. This can be memory (e.g. RAM), computer power (e.g. CPU) or data in a general matter. Although various P2P-applications are used in a significant way on the internet, one of the most common application is content distribution, better known as file sharing.
With the start of Napster [1] in 1998, file-sharing applications have emerged as a killer-application [2] on the internet. Whether it is the distribution of large files, documents, music, streaming media, or hosting of arbitrary web services. The significant difference which divides content distribution from any other kind of sharing resources is its consumption of bandwidth. Recent studies on a swiss network node have shown that P2P-networks (e.g. Gnutella, Freenet, eDonkey, BitTorrent) significantly out weight web traffic and are the single largest consumer of data on this Internet Service Provider network [3]. These measurements could be assigned to other countries and their highly frequented network nodes. The results would surely be the same. Thus, P2P-applications have an enormous impact on the internet traffic and also on the Internet Service Provider network management. Since the beginning of P2P-applications it has been a discussion over the usage of P2P-networks, whether they offer legal or illegal content. It is no secret that most of the shared data in common P2P-networks consists of illegal content. On the other hand companies see the potential in P2P-technolgie. RedHat, i.e., distributes their Linux-Images over BitTorrent, because it would be too expensive to provide the necessary server-infrastructure including the server hardware and bandwidth capacity. And this is only one small example. There are many ways to use P2P-technologie for legal content distribution and P2P still grows in popularity.
