Lobster- A Load Balanced {P2P} Content Sharing Network

The unpredictable growth of the Internet community as well as the size of information available, have overwhelmed the traditional models of distributed computing. Client/server computing seems unable to cope with the constantly increasing need for larger systems. The peer-to-peer (P2P) model, although originally conceived much earlier, has recently emerged as a new way to create distributed environments. The concept of peers which play both client and server roles seems vera attractive, especially in respect to scalability issues. In this text, we shall present Lobster, a scalable P2P content sharing system which provides two fundamental properties, load balancing and short query response times. Our work includes the design as well as the implementation of the system in the Java programming language