Structured overlay networks form a major classof peer-to-peer systems, which are touted for their abilitiesto scale, tolerate failures, and self-manage. Any long livedInternet-scale distributed system is destined to facenetwork partitions. Although the problem of network partitionsand mergers is highly related to fault-tolerance andself-management in large-scale systems, it has hardly beenstudied in the context of structured peer-to-peer systems.These systems have mainly been studied under churn (frequentjoins/failures), which as a side effect solves the problemof network partitions, as it is similar to massive nodefailures. Yet, the crucial aspect of network mergers has beenignored. In fact, it has been claimed that ring-based structuredoverlay networks, which constitute the majority of thestructured overlays, are intrinsically ill-suited for mergingrings. In this thesis, we present a number of research papers representing our work on handling network partitions and mergers in structured overlay networks. The contribution of this thesis is threefold. First, we provide a solution for merging ring-based structured overlays. Our solution is tuneable, by a {\em fanout} parameter, to achieve a trade-off between message and time complexity. Second, we provide a network size estimation algorithm for ring-based structured overlays. We believe that an estimate of the current network size can be used for tuning overlay parameters that change according to the network size, for instance the fanout parameter in our merger solution.Third, we extend our work from fixing routing anomalies to achieving data consistency. We argue that decreasing lookup inconsistencies on the routing level aids in achieving data consistency in applications built on top of overlays. We study the frequency of occurence of lookup inconsistencies and discuss solutions to decrease the affect of lookup inconsistencies.

Peer-to-peer network applications has been a tremendous success among end users and has therefore received much attention in academia and industry, as have illegal public file sharing in media. However, private peer-to-peer file sharing between family, friends and co-workers have attracted little interest from the research community. Existing approaches also limit the users by not allowing for native interaction with userspace applications. In this paper we ex- -plore how private file sharing can be made safe, fast and scalable without constraining the users in this aspect. We demonstrate the concept of a private file sharing application utilizing a decentralized peer-to-peer network overlay by creating a prototype with extreme program- ming as methodology. To maximize the freedom of users the network is accessed through a virtual file-system interface. The prototype proves this to be a valid approach and we hope readers can use this paper as a platform for further developments in this area. / Fildelningsapplikationer som använder peer-to-peer teknik har varit en enorm framgång blandslutanvändare och har därmed erhållit mycket uppmärksamhet från akademi och indus- tri, liksom olaglig fildelning fått inom media. Däremot har inte privat fildelning mellan vän- ner, arbetskamrater och kollegor tilldelats samma uppmärksamhet från forskningssamfundet. Nuvarande tillämpningar begränsar användaren genom att inte tillåta naturlig interaktion med användarapplikationer. I denna uppsats utforskar vi hur privat fildelning kan göras snabb, skalbar och säker utan att begränsa användaren ur den aspekten. Vi demonstrerar ett koncept- för privat fildelning som nyttjar decentraliserad peer-to-peer arkitektur m.h.a en prototyp som tagits fram med extreme programming som metodologi. För att maximera användarnas frihet nyttjas ett virtuellt filsystem som gränssnitt. Prototypen visar att vår tillämpning fungerar i praktiken och vi hoppas att läsaren kan använda vårt arbete som en plattform för fortsatt utveckling inom detta område.