U-Share Service Structure Design for Efficient Development of P2P Applications

Recently various services using the P2P technology such as e-donkey and Napster are appearing. The purpose of these P2P services is to allow many users to share, download and upload multimedia contents such as music and video files. However, even though the basic protocols for P2P networks are similar, different P2P services are not compatible with one another. The reason is because each P2P service has been developed on the proprietary P2P platform designed by the respective service provider, and does not support other P2P services although they are similar. To enable compatibility among these P2P services that have been designed differently, a common P2P platform and common service support structure for P2P service programs developed on this platform are required. This paper defines the essential components of a P2P application as U-Share services, and designs peer and peer group management structure among them.