Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have recently become a very important part of the Internet. Unprecedented popularity, low overhead, and high scalability of these networks make them highly appealing to a wide range of end users. This proposal studies fundamental performance limitations of the existing and recently proposed peer-to-peer architectures and examines inherent scalability issues of these networks. Outside the P2P community, this project provides a better understanding of large-scale self-reconfiguring systems and leads to the development of new algorithms for future implementation of various information-centric routing infrastructures.
