I'm a researcher and teaching assistant at the Computer Science and Engineering Department - INGI, part of the EPL of the Université catholique de Louvain - UCL, Belgium. My research focus is self-management of large scale decentralised systems, which basically means that I work a lot with peer-to-peer networks.

Why decentralised systems? Because centralised systems presents a single point of failure - No server, no application. And even if they do not fail, they are a point of congestion. Why peer-to-peer systems? Because it is feasible to provide self-organisation, efficient routing, and they are more tolerant to failures. If one peer is down, another peer can carry on with its task. To be able to provide this recovery mechanism, it is necessary to have a good replication policy, and a consistent way of assigning responsibility to the peers.

So, what do we do with the peer-to-peer network once we have it? The idea is to build services on top of this network. We would also need a good decentralised transaction protocol, that allows us to store the data of the service in a consistent way. I'm currently studying the "Atomic Commitment in Transactional DHTs", by Monika Moser and Seif Haridi . This protocol provides mainly two properties: Atomic commit and Concurrency Control . I'm currently working on the implementation of this protocol on P2PS.