J Supercomput DOI 10.1007/s11227-009-0334-1 Efficient peerGroup management in JXTA-Overlay P2P system for developing groupware tools Fatos Xhafa · Leonard Barolli · Santi Caballé · Raul Fernández © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009 Abstract With the fast development of IT technologies, virtual organizations are more and more present in the current collaborative work and learning activity. For instance, many subjects in virtual distance learning are organized as online groups of students, who use groupware tools to complete their learning tasks. In this paper, we address the efficient management of peer groups in JXTA-based P2P systems as a key issue in many P2P applications that use peer group as a unit such as for remote execution of tasks in parallel and distributed applications. From this perspective, we consider peer grouping as the basis in the development of groupware tools in P2P systems. Motivated by the need to support online teams of real virtual campuses, in this work we propose the management of peer groups in JXTA-Overlay, a JXTA-based P2P middleware for the development of P2P applications. To this end, by taking ad- vantage of the peerGroup entity in JXTA library we have designed and implemented a set of primitives as part of JXTA-Overlay aiming to support efficient peer group F. Xhafa ( ) Dept. of Languages and Informatics Systems, Technical University of Catalonia, Campus Nord, Ed. Omega, C/Jordi Girona 1-3, 08034 Barcelona, Spain e-mail: fatos@lsi.upc.edu L. Barolli Dept. of Information and Communication Engineering, Fukuoka Institute of Technology (FIT), 3-30-1 Wajiro-higashi, Higashi-ku, Fukuoka 811-0295, Japan e-mail: barolli@fit.ac.jp S. Caballé · R. Fernández Dept. of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunication, Open University of Catalonia, Rambla del Poblenou, 156, 08018, Barcelona, Spain S. Caballé e-mail: scaballe@uoc.edu R. Fernández e-mail: rfernandezco@uoc.edu