Welcome to PROFILES homepage
PROFILES (PeeR-to-peer beyOnd FILE Sharing) is a two-year italian research project partially supported by MIUR under the PRIN (Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale) funding program 2007-2008.
The project addresses the study of peer-to-peer (P2P) communication systems, considering P2P as a novel communication paradigm that is changing the rules of the communication game in the Internet. P2P applications (Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa, ...) became famous (or infamous!) thanks to file-sharing and the exchange of copyrighted information. However, the key point for the success of P2P networks are cooperation and resource sharing, which make the system scalable, highly performing, dependable, and resilient. Recent P2P systems like Bit-Torrent, Split-Stream, and Skype made it clear that P2P networking can address many other applications apart from file-sharing.
Eight Universities grouped in four Research Units participates in this project whose goal, besides fundamental research, is also the development of prototype sub-systems.