Peer-to-Peer Network (P2P)

A distributed application network in which each individual node (computer) is connected to a common protocol (the internet) which is used to share files and transfer data between each node. This model can be less efficient than a centralized network, but the tradeoff is increased resilience because there is no single point of failure. Perhaps most importantly, peers in the network allow a portion of their computing resources such as computing power, network bandwidth, and data storage to be directly available to other peers without the need for a centralized authority or host. The most notable example of a peer-to-peer network is the internet.