Peer-to-Peer Netw Appl (2008) 1:12 DOI 10.

1007/s12083-007-0005-z

EDITORIAL

Editorial: Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications, Volume 1, Issue 1

Xuemin Shen & Heather Yu

Received: 3 December 2007 / Accepted: 5 December 2007 / Published online: 2 February 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is an emerging model for service distribution. The P2P model has already been established as an important area of distributed computing where an extremely large number of users collaborate and share their resources. In contrast to the traditional centralized server-based service model, i.e., client-server and push models, the P2P model is characterized by cooperation among peers, decentralization, self-organization, and heterogeneity. The notion of client or server is dubious here; instead, any peer is eligible to take the place of any other peer, if the resource constraints are satisfied. P2P computing has attracted great attention from both academia and industry. The introduction of Napster, Gnutella, KaZaA, and BitTorrent not only had an amazing impact on the research community but was also accompanied by overwhelming success among users. Recently, P2P applications for information storage and retrieval, teleconferencing, and audio-video streaming have been appearing. However, there are many challenging and open technical issues to be addressed. Some of these issues are generic in nature and applicable to any P2P application, whereas others are application-specific. Scalability, reliability, convulsions of resources due to constant joining and leaving of peers, security, and misuse from selfish and malicious peers are some of the generic problems. Quality-of-service (QoS) support, coding techniques, and P2P networking architectures are a few issues related to P2P Multimedia-on-

X. Shen (*) University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada e-mail: xshen@bbcr.uwaterloo.ca H. Yu Huawei Technologies, Middletown, NJ, USA

Demand (MoD) applications. Other P2P applications face a variety of challenges pertaining to the application domains. The aim of the Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications journal is to publish state-of-the-art research and development results in all subject areas of P2P networking, applications and services in the form of regular papers, tutorials, surveys, case studies and correspondences. In the first issue of Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications journal, we have included six papers in different areas of P2P networking and applications. In the first paper, An efficient and scalable framework for content-based publish/subscribe systems, Zhu and Shen address the challenges of content-based publish-subscribe systems and present an efficient and scalable framework. Subscription information is organized and partitioned dynamically using K-D trees, which enables subscription locality and load balancing. In the second paper, A survey on peer-to-peer video streaming systems, Liu, Guo and Liang present a comprehensive survey on P2P live streaming and video-on-demand systems. They also identify the open issues related to P2P video streaming. Selfish peers often misuse their P2P networks by getting services from the peers but providing little or no service to others in return. In the third paper, Incentive mechanism for the CoopNet network, Manzato and Fonseca address this issue and propose an incentive mechanism for the CoopNet. A survey on content delivery in P2P systems is presented in the fourth paper, On peer-to-peer (P2P) content delivery, where Li discusses different deployed P2P applications and research proposals. Different overlay creation and P2P scheduling techniques are also presented. Various Distributed Hash Table (DHT) techniques have been proposed to achieve efficient lookup in P2P storage systems. In the fifth paper, DHT routing analysis in a logarithmically transformed space, Kersch and Szab develop a general model to analytically describe different

Peer-to-Peer Netw Appl (2008) 1:12 tions and Networking. He also serves as a Founding Area Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications; Editor-in-Chief for Peer-to-Peer Networking and Application; Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology; KICS/IEEE Journal of Communications and Networks, Computer Networks; ACM/Wireless Networks; and Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (Wiley), etc. He has also served as Guest Editor for IEEE JSAC, IEEE Wireless Communications, and IEEE Communications Magazine. Dr. Shen received the Excellent Graduate Supervision Award in 2006, and the Outstanding Performance Award in 2004 from the University of Waterloo, the Premier s Research Excellence Award (PREA) in 2003 from the Province of Ontario, Canada, and the Distinguished Performance Award in 2002 from the Faculty of Engineering, University of Waterloo. Dr. Shen is a registered Professional Engineer of Ontario, Canada.

fundamental properties of DHT techniques. In the sixth paper, An inexpensive unstructured platform for wireless mobile peer-to-peer networks, Akon, Shen, Naik, Singh and Zhang propose an unstructured P2P platform for wireless mobile networks. The proposed platform focuses on the constraints of expensive bandwidth of wireless medium and the limited memory and computing power of mobile devices, and provides a low cost framework for different peer-to-peer applications. In closing, we would like to acknowledge the contributions of the authors who submitted their works and the reviewers who provided their expert opinions and constructive and helpful comments. We would also like to extend our sincere thanks to Melissa Fearon, the Senior Editor, Karen S. Cullen, Valerie Schofield, and Cristina Chua of Springer, for their support and help in bringing forward this first issue. We hope that you will enjoy the current and future issues of this journal.

Xuemin (Sherman) Shen (M'97-SM'02) received the B.Sc.(1982) degree from Dalian Maritime University (China) and the M.Sc. (1987) and Ph.D. degrees (1990) from Rutgers University, New Jersey (USA), all in Electrical Engineering. He is a Professor and University Research Chair, and the Associate Chair for Graduate Studies, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada. His research focuses on mobility and resource management in interconnected wireless/wired networks, UWB wireless communications systems, wireless security, and ad hoc and sensor networks. He is a co-author of three books, and has published more than 300 papers and book chapters in wireless communications and networks, control and filtering. Dr. Shen serves as the Technical Program Committee Chair for IEEE Globecom'07, General Co-Chair for Chinacom07 and QShine06, the Founding Chair for IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on P2P Communica-

Heather Yu received her Ph.D. degree from the Electrical Engineering Department, Princeton University in 1998. She was with Panasonic Princeton Laboratory from Sept. 1998 to March 2007. In April 2007, she joined America Core Network R&D Department of Huawei Technologies USA as the Manager of Media Technologies. Her major research interests include multimedia communications, next generation multimedia networks, peer-to-peer networking, and multimedia security. She holds 30 granted patents and has published 1 book, 5 book chapters, and more than 60 technical papers in related fields. Currently, she is serving as the Associate EiC for Peer-to-peer Networking and Applications Journal, on the Board of Directors for Institute for Semantic Computing, and as the CIO of PFR. She also serves as Editor for ACM Computers in Entertainment, IEEE Multimedia Magazine, International Journal on Semantic Computing, and Telecommunication Systems Journal, Conference Steering Committee Member of IEEE ICME and IEEE CCNC, and Conference Cochair of IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing 2008. From 1998-2007, she served as journal associate editor, conference technical program chair, keynote speaker, panelist, panel chair, and steering committee member for various conferences.