Peer-to-peer systems for simple and flexible information sharing

Abstract

Peer to peer computing (P2P) is an architecture that enables applications to access shared resources, with peers having similar capabilities and responsibilities. The ubiquity of P2P computing and its increasing adoption for a decentralized data sharing mechanism have fueled my research interests. P2P networks are useful for sharing content files containing audio, video, and data. This research aims to address the problem of simple and flexible access to data from a variety of data sources across peers with different operating systems, databases and hardware. The proposed architecture makes use of SQL queries, web services, heterogeneous database servers and XML data transformation for the peer to peer data sharing prototype. SQL queries and web services provide a data sharing mechanism that allows both simple and flexible data access.