Abstract
The unpredictable growth of the Internet community as well as the size of
information available, have overwhelmed the traditional models of distributed
computing. Client/server computing seems unable to cope with the constantly
increasing need for larger systems.
The peer-to-peer (P2P) model, although originally conceived much earlier, has
recently emerged as a new way to create distributed environments. The concept
of peers which play both client and server roles seems vera attractive,
especially in respect to scalability issues.
In this text, we shall present Lobster, a scalable P2P content sharing system
which provides two fundamental properties, load balancing and short query
response times. Our work includes the design as well as the implementation of
the system in the Java programming language.
