B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

472 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
Ability to discover other peers
A P2P application should be able to locate other peers in the network.
Since P2P networks cannot operate in an environment of stable
connectivity and fixed IP addresses, the nodes (each device in the
network is known as a node) have to operate outside Domain Name
Service (DNS — converts names to IP addresses) system.
So, how are the peers able to locate each other? Well, this can be
achieved in a pure P2P-based architecture (see Figure 16.1) by network
broadcasting and in a P2P-based architecture with a central server (see
Figure 16.2), which is used to maintain a list of all the current
Peer
Figure 16.1. — Pure P2P-based architecture
Figure 16.2. — P2P-based architecture using a central server