Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Global network positioning is a coordinates-based mechanism in a peer-to-peer network architecture which predicts Internet network distance (i.e. round-trip propagation and transmission delay). The mechanism is based on absolute coordinates computed from modeling the Internet as a geometric space. Since end hosts maintain their own coordinates, the approach allows end hosts to compute their inter-host distances as soon as they discover each other. Moreover, coordinates are very efficient in summarizing inter-host distances, making the approach very scalable. A peer-to-peer, commonly abbreviated to P2P, is any distributed network architecture composed of participants that make a portion of their resources (such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth) directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination instances (such as servers or stable hosts).