Definition
A peer-to-peer overlay network is a computer network built on top of an existing network, usually the Internet. Peer-to-peer overlay networks enable participating peers to find the other peers not by the IP addresses but by the specific logical identifiers known to all peers. Usually, peer-to-peer overlays have the advantage over the traditional client-server systems because of their scalability and lack of single-point-of-failure. Peer-to-peer overlays are commonly used for file sharing and real time data streaming.
Historical Background
The rise of the Internet brought the first instances of peer-to-peer overlays like the Domain Name System (DNS), the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), USENET and more recently IPv6, which were needed to facilitate the operation of the Internet itself. These peer-to-peer overlays were intrinsically decentralized and represented symmetric nature of the Internet, where every node in the overlay had equal status and assumed cooperative...
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Galuba, W., Girdzijauskas, S. (2018). Peer-to-Peer Overlay Networks: Structure, Routing and Maintenance. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1215
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