Self-Organization in Peer-to-Peer Systems

Peer-to-Peer Systems are about community-based cooperations. The peers share responsibilities and benefits by cooperating in a distributed and decentralized environment. To carry out tasks sensibly, however, a more or less rigid order is required for efficiency and reliability reasons. This order can be partially imposed from the outside, for example within so-called "structed" Peer-to-Peer systems. A common approach here is the use of Distributed Hash Tables. Alternatively, Peer-to-Peer systems can be "unstructured" in the sense that an useful order emerges from own internal processes. Unstructured and structured Peer-to-Peer systems rely both on a more or less decentralized overlay management. Self-organization, therefore, is a key to the success of Peer-to-Peer systems in various forms. This presentation gives an overview of the role of self-organization in Peer-to-Peer systems.