Nearby began as a project for my computer architecture class, ENGR 3220 Computer Architecture at Olin College. Since it turned out to be successful, I decided to Open Source and it give it to the world. As part of the project I conducted some research into other peer to peer networks in order to gain knowledge of how others have constructed them. Below is a summary of what I found.
Prior Work
Gnutella - The most popular peer to peer network whose sole goal is to share files. The network is not strictly peer to peer as some peers are superpeers which spend more time dedicated to housekeeping. While there is much literature which analyzes the Gnutella network for efficiency and strength, there are few papers which give an overview of its basic architecture. Due to the lack of simple architecture information, impure peer to peer paradigm and focus on sharing files, little information about Gnutella was used in the creation of Nearby.
FreeNet - The most well known secure publishing network. Through the use of indirect routing and encrypted file stores FreeNet's claim to fame is its ability to disguise who is hosting content and who is receiving it. Again the focus of this project is sharing files, so little was used in the creation of Nearby.
Upon completion of my research into existing peer to peer networks, it became apparent that none of the peer to peer networks focused on providing high availability services other than file sharing. However I believe that peer to peer networks would be ideal paradigm for creating services which were run over wireless networks. On wireless access points nodes (users) frequently enter and leave but while present they would like to access the available services. With the above information in mind I set out to design an application which would allow for those types of services to be created.
