Peer-to-peer networking is also abbreviated as P2P. You might have come across this term many times and wondered what it was. P2P is a new-age computing technique that chops down workloads into random parts. Each part will be rendered by a distributed computing architecture. P2P is increasingly becoming popular by people with huge data needs.The part rendering the partial workload will be performed by a peer. Every peer will have the equal responsibility of ensuring the task becomes a success.  In a computer networking, P2P network can form between groups of computers that are connected by a common application installed on them.

The idea behind a P2P network is multiple. Computing resources like processor power, storage capacity, and bandwidth are shared between the computers. By doing this, pressure is released of a single computer that will need to perform the task, in case if P2P networking was not existent.

P2P nodes intake and output resources like multimedia content and so on. This is different from the client-server model where only one computer is the consumer while the other is a server. In P2P networking the nodes are both servers as well as consumers.

P2P is extremely useful for sharing files. When huge chunks of data need to be downloaded P2P networks solve this problem. While in the traditional methods, one server was accessed for a huge chunk of file, in P2P, ‘’seeds’’ are searched. Seeds are computers that already have this file.

The advantages of this technology are immense. In the age of increasing demand for multimedia resources over the internet, a distributed resource and task sharing mechanism eases network traffic. The decentralized approach is better than a centralized one where a single server or single servers will be pounded with requests for data. Without such technology it might be virtually impossible to download movies over the internet. Even if possible it could take much more time than what it could if using P2P technology.