Consumer communications and networking [guest editorial]

A technology that is increasingly visible in the consumer communications domain is peer-to-peer (P2P) communications networks. This is due not mainly to illegal downloads or file sharing, but much more to large-scale consumer communications and distributing contents among subscribers. The main advantage of P2P overlay networks over client-server-based systems is that they do not require central server components; and with respect to management and maintenance, P2P systems are self-managing, in that they can cope with nodes leaving and joining even at a high churn rate. Moreover, P2P systems are very scalable and can cope with a large number of nodes. Typically P2P systems operate as an overlay network on top of the IP layer.