Peer: an architectural pattern

Virtual Organizations (VOs) are transitory communities made of individuals and institutions coupled together by advanced communications technologies. Today’s VOs are more and more demanding in terms of efficiency and flexibility of the technological infrastructure. Envisioning VOs in which all participants are both resource providers and consumers, in a peer-to-peer fashion, seems to be an appropriate solution. This paper proposes a structure for programmed elements, i.e. Peers, sharing resources through a peer-to-peer network. Publishing and discovery of resource provision services are managed by the routing and communication modules. The first one creates publication/query messages and computes their destination, which is then used by the communication service to transport the message to the destination Peer