Data Management in Peer-to-Peer Environment: A Perspective of BestPeer

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems have attracted muchattention in academic community and industry circles due to theirpromising applications in various domains. This paper presents theauthors' research efforts on introducing complex query capabilities in a P2Penvironment consisting of numerous peers with large volume of data. Anunderlying hybrid P2P computing platform, named BestPeer is describedfirst. The connection among peers within BestPeer isself-configurable through maintaining the nearest neighbor of peers,and the agent techniques employed in the system ensure its capabilityof providing sophisticated services. The designs of three P2P datamanagement systems which are all based on BestPeer are described indetail. They provide support for information retrieval, queryprocessing and Web services respectively. Advantages and limitationsare discussed, while ongoing work is presented. Current systems canprovide basic functions for keyword-based search, SQL-like queryprocessing, and Web services querying and discovery. Some furthertopics on providing fully-fledged data management functionalities forP2P distributed computing systems with security guarantee are alsodiscussed.