Despite the existence of many peer-to-peer systems, some of their design choices and implications are not well understood. This paper compares several distributed and peer-to-peer systems by evaluating a key set of architectural decisions: naming, addressing, routing, topology, and name lookup. Using the WWW, Triad, and Chord/CFS as examples, we illustrate how different architectural choices impact availability, redundancy, security, and fault-tolerance.

Appeared in Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS) 2002, Cambridge, MA, USA

March 2002