A peer-to-peer network (P2P)
A peer-to-peer network differs from a server-based network in that its nodes are not divided to servers and clients, but each node is both server and client. Nodes of a P2P network are peers that produce the network and work as servers to each other. There are different peer-to-peer systems, not all of them being all-connected. They vary in their level of centralization and in their modes of connection, as well as in structure. Not all systems are structured, but neither are all the P2P systems unstructured. P2P network can be formed for creative purposes.
All-connected, decentralized P2P-network.
One of the strengths of the Internet is that it is built as an end-to-end (e2e) system. This is a “stupid” system, it is designed to be sort of minimal network, simply connecting the ends to each other. It differs from an “smart” system, where you have to register yourself to the system before you can use it, and where you can use it only if you're having an end suitable to that system, and the network thus is “smart” in the sense that it recognizes and registers the right ends. An e2e network accepts any ends that are physically capable to connect to it, and all the intelligence is in the ends that connect to the network. [Lessig]. This allows the network to accept applications that were not foreseen when the network was built. Indeed; your phone plugging into the Web via wireless connection was not foreseen when the Internet was invented, and would it have been designed as a “smart” system instead, there would perhaps be no such a possibility as connecting your cell phone to the Web. An unstructured, non-centralized and non-hierarchical P2P network can provide good conditions for fast, innovative and secure development. The open source software is developed in a society built as a P2P network, as a peer production.