Editorial Special Issue: Resource Discovery Mechanisms for P2P Systems

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing has recently emerged as a new distributed computing paradigm enabling large-scale aggregation of resources such as files, applications, services, storage, processing cycles and services. The resources of a P2P network are geographically distributed and belong to unrelated administrative domains. In recent years the P2P paradigm has been exploited in new contexts such as online-gaming, Semantic Web and large scale or federated cloud computing platforms. Despite the results obtained by many researchers, advancing in information technology poses many challenges in terms of protocols, infrastructures, secure and efficient access and allocation of resources, fault tolerance, scalability and performance. Particular interest has been expressed on resource discovery, in particular on the expressiveness and the effectiveness of the resource selection mechanisms. Being able to select in an efficient way a set of resources that meet specific criteria is a requirement of many applications like cloud applications and online-gaming. This special issue mainly focuses on new methods and algorithms to efficiently and effectively access resources distributed on P2P networks. The selected papers discuss also further topics such as epidemic protocols for information dissemination, scheduling and load balancing algorithms for large scale distributed platforms. We received 36 submissions and selected the following 14 papers. We congratulate the authors and thank the papers' reviewers, without their work this special issue would not be possible. The following one is a brief description of the accepted papers.