Napster was probably one of the first popular peer-to-peer application. Since then, many other peer-to-peer techniques and been developed and measurement studies show that in some parts of the Internet peer-to-peer applications generate more packets than classical client server applications. During the last ten years, many papers have been written on peer-to-peer technologies. The new book written by Buford, Yu and Lua has collected more than 550 references and provides a detailed and up-to-date survey on the peer-to-peer world.

The book starts with an introduction of the motivations for peer-to-peer and the principles behind overlay networks. Then, two important chapters are the presentation of the unstructured and structured overlays. The main types of peer-to-peer overlays are described in details. The authors choose to reprint the key figures from several of the main types of overlays. This allows the reader to have a quick and detailed overview of the main papers from the peer-to-peer literature. Then, 10 chapters are devoted to different issues affecting peer-to-peer applications. The first problem is how an overlay is maintained. Then, existing peer-to-peer protocols (gnutella, bittorrent and microsoft windows p2p) are described. Different types of peer-to-peer applications have been developed and deployed. The book considers three common problems in such applications. The first problem is how to perform search in a peer-to-peer overlay. Different techniques are described and compared. The second problem is how to use a peer-to-peer overlay to distribute content and the role of caching. The third problem is how to use a peer-to-peer overlay to provide multicast services. The book ends with five chapters on different topics. First, Internet coordinate systems as presented. Then, service overlays including RoN or the utilisation of a peer-to-peer overlay to provide DNS service are discussed. A chapter is devoted to Voice over peer-to-peer with discussions of skype and peer-to-peer SIP.

This book is highly recommended for researchers of graduate students who need to use or improve peer-to-peer techniques. It can also be used for an advanced networking course.

J. Buford, H. Yu, E. K. Lua, P2P : Networking and Applications, Morgan Kaufmann, ISBN 978-0-12-374214-8