| A peer-to-peer internet chat infrastructure:
A major problem with current irc is the centralized server
architecture. In the presence of network failures, this leads to
network partitions (netsplits). Of course, netsplits cannot be avoided
but the problem can be minimized as long as one does not loose the
people one is chatting with, or is interested to chat with. The goal
of this project is to design "clients" that use the servers only to
identify the interested chatters and then maintain peer-to-peer
connections with them. Second, any client should be able to act as a
server (basically a directory), and users can specify a degree of
resilience when connecting to the infrastructure to replicate the
information about their presence in more than one server.
It should also allow users to select the servers they want to use,
based on the quality of service it can provide (reliability, latency,
capacity). Contact: Umar Saif
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