Mutable Peer-to-Peer File Systems: Analysis and Evaluation

Peer-to-peer networks have become extremely popular over the last decades for one major reason. They make the exchange of files between users easy and fast. Peer-to-peer systems have been proved to be the basis for the creation of worldwide networks where users exchange read-only files freely and efficiently. However, users have started using applications that need more than what the exchange of immutable files can offer. Collaborative Wikis have emerged as a phenomenon of people´s behavior to communicate and collaboratively create and maintain large collections of documents. Communities that do not want to rely on centralized servers and legacy applications would benefit from using peer-to-peer systems for their purposes. The immutability of files that peer-to-peer systems can support however, cannot possibly serve this purpose. This paper makes three contributions towards the advances in theoretical foundations of P2P. It analyzes existing peer-to-peer systems supporting mutable files and indicates their successes and failures in this direction. It describes the characteristics that a mutable peer-to-peer file system should have in order to be able to support applications with characteristics of collaborative Wikis. Finally, it proposes an architecture for the creation of a new peer-to-peer system with the desirable characteristics, based on already existing systems.