Client-server versus P2P networks
This section starts by describing the traditional client-server architecture, and goes on to describe how the P2P architecture works. The section ends with a comparison between P2P and client-server architectures.
Traditional client-server architecture
Client-server architecture is a network architecture in which each node (computer or device) on the network is either a client or a server. It is based on the consumer model, that is, the clients consume what is available on the servers. Servers are powerful computers dedicated to managing network traffic and other shared resources such as disk drives and printers. Servers provide services via various protocols like Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).
Clients are the nodes on the network that consume services provided by the servers. The client nodes need not be as powerful as servers. What makes the difference in computing power requirement is that a few servers...