Overview

The big picture:

There are several communications paradigms which are used nowadays. Namely Group Communication which is a paradigm that makes easier the implementation of replication solutions or ensure consistency among a set of peers.

We already have a software suite of Group Communication implemented for the Appia framework, however, Group Communication is only one existing paradigm. There are other which deserve our attention such as the Publish-Subscribe paradigm or the Peer-to-Peer paradigm.

In this context, peer-to-peer is a specially attractive paradigm for several reasons: i) It supports large scale distributed systems, that can have thousand of participants; ii) Peer-to-peer systems can cope well with large fault rates and with highly dynamic environments; iii) its a paradigm that has received much attention from the scientific and industrial communities in recent years and finally; iv) we also work on this field ;) .

The peer-to-peer architecture:

The picture above depicts our planned architecture for supporting P2P applications. As one can expect this is not a closed and static architecture. It aims at be as open and adaptive as possible, and its design may be updated in the future, as the project progresses.