A software architecture for a fully decentralized peer to peer system

Abstract

In a peer to peer system, each entity needs some services from other entities in the network, and is capable of providing services to other entities in the network. For the system to work each entity has to contribute at least as much as it is receiving. But for this to happen, since the services requested and offered are different across entities, the relative values of each service have to be determined. The relative value of a resource must depend on how much of it is demanded and how much of it is available on the network. A separation of concerns approach in such systems will have to be devised keeping in mind the fact that any concern that the node sets apart as the service providing node's will have to be handled by it when it is acting as the service provider. Furthermore, the distribution of work is also to be handled. All this has to be done without compromising on the quality of service. This paper defines a software architecture for a pure peer to peer system, which uses network science to optimize the overlay network, thereby improving quality of service as well as fault tolerance. © 2015 IEEE.