Peer-to-peer network

A peer-to-peer (P2P) network is a decentralized communication model in which each peer can act as both a client and a server. In a P2P network, peers share resources and information directly with each other without using any sort of central server.

Every computer is able to connect to every other computer directly - there’s no need to go through a central authority (server).

Advantages of P2P networks

• They’re more resilient to failure, because there’s no central point of failure. If one peer goes down, the others can still communicate with each other - one device breaking doesn’t bring them all down!
• They’re more scalable, because you can add more peers to the network without needing to worry about a central server getting overwhelmed.
• They’re more private, because there’s no central authority that can monitor or control the communication between peers.
• They’re more efficient, because peers can share resources directly with each other, without needing to go through a central server.

Advantages of client-server networks

• The server has central control over all the devices
• Easier to manage the network
• Can install and update software on just one machine, and it will update everywhere
• Easier to back up data, because it’s all stored on the server
• Can have better security, because the server can control who has access to what resources
• The server can be very powerful if a single user wants to use a lot of its processing power
• The clients can be pretty cheap, because they don’t need to do much processing
• If the organisation wants to prevent access to certain resources, they can do that easily with a client-server network, because the server has control over who can access what (e.g. they can block any non-work related websites)

Disadvantages of P2P networks

• They can be less secure, because there’s no central server to ‘protect’ the clients
• It can potentially be more expensive, because each peer needs to have the resources to act as both a client and a server (all the computers need to be more powerful)
• It can be harder to manage, because there’s no central point of control
• It can be harder to back up data, because it’s distributed across all the peers
• Can be harder to update software, because you need to update it on each peer individually
• Censorship by your organisation is more difficult… I’ll let you decide on where this should go :)
• If one peer is malicious, it can potentially cause problems for the other peers, because they are sharing resources directly with each other (e.g. it could spread malware to the other peers)