Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, or peer computing, is a paradigm that is viewed as a potential technology for redesigning distributed architectures and, consequently, distributed processing. Yet the scale and dynamism that characterize P2P systems demand that we reexamine traditional distributed technologies. A paradigm shift that includes self-reorganization, adaptation and resilience is called for. On the other hand, the increased computational power of such networks opens up completely new applications, such as in digital content sharing, scientific computation, gaming, or collaborative work environments.

In this book, Vu, Lupu and Ooi present the technical challenges offered by P2P systems, and the means that have been proposed to address them. They provide a thorough and comprehensive review of recent advances on routing and discovery methods; load balancing and replication techniques; security, accountability and anonymity, as well as trust and reputation schemes; programming models and P2P systems and projects. Besides surveying existing methods and systems, they also compare and evaluate some of the more promising schemes.

The need for such a book is evident. It provides a single source for practitioners, researchers and students on the state of the art. For practitioners, this book explains best practice, guiding selection of appropriate techniques for each application. For researchers, this book provides a foundation for the development of new and more effective methods. For students, it is an overview of the wide range of advanced techniques for realizing effective P2P systems, and it can easily be used as a text for an advanced course on Peer-to-Peer Computing and Technologies, or as a companion text for courses on various subjects, such as distributed systems, and grid and cluster computing.

Quang Hieu Vu is currently a Research Fellow at Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore. He obtained his PhD degree from the Singapore-MIT Alliance in 2008. Before joining I2R, he was respectively a Research Fellow at National University of Singapore and Imperial College London. His research interests include peer-to-peer, information retrieval, and network security.

Mihai Lupu has been a post-doctoral research fellow with the Information Retrieval Facility in Vienna, Austria, since October 2008. He has recently received his PhD degree from the Singapore-MIT Alliance at the National University of Singapore, where he has worked mostly on Information Retrieval on Peer-to-Peer Networks. His research interests include information retrieval and management, peer-to-peer and ad-hoc networks.

Beng Chin Ooi is Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He obtained his PhD from Monash University, Australia, in 1989. He has served as a PC member for international conferences including ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, IEEE ICDE, WWW, SIGKDD and is the recipient of ACM SIGMOD 2009 Contributions award and an IEEE fellow. His research interests include database performance issues, indexing techniques, multimedia and spatio-temporal databases, P2P systems and advanced applications, and data intensive scalable computing.