Summary

Recommendation ITU-T X.609 describes the detailed functional architecture of managed P2P networking and the information flows for providing managed P2P-based services.

A peer-to-peer (P2P) network is composed of participants called peers that share their available resources such as processing power, storage or network resources that are available to other participants without central coordination. P2P networking characteristics include self-organization, high scalability and sharing of resources among many other participants. These characteristics mean that P2P technology can be used in various applications such as file distribution, distributed computing, VoIP, media streaming, etc. In spite of various advantages such as high scalability and high throughput, P2P networking may incur problems such as high churn, illegal distribution of content or absence of distribution control. Managed P2P networking aims to provide manageability features for P2P networking.