About the value of virtual communities in P2P networks

Abstract

The recently introduced peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are currently the most popular Internet applications. This contribution is intended to show that such decentralized architecture could be served as a suitable structure to support virtual communities. This contribution is focused on the social and economic importance of topological aspects of P2P network communities. It shows that, besides the content offered, the structures of the connections and interactions of the users play an important role for the value of the whole network. Different from social networks, the topology of P2P systems can be influenced by different working automatically in the background algorithms. The paper introduced distributed content-oriented and traffic-oriented methods for doing so. The simulation shows the results for the structure- and topology-evolution in the community. © Springer-Verlag 2004.