Load balancing is defined as the methodical and efficient distribution of network or application traffic across multiple servers in a server farm. Each load balancer sits between client devices and backend servers, receiving and then distributing incoming requests to any available server capable of fulfilling them.
In a [[peer-to-peer]] network, two or more computers (''peers'') pool their resources and communicate in a [[decentralized system]]. Peers are coequal, or equipotent [[Node (networking)|nodes]] in a non-hierarchical network. Unlike clients in a client-server or [[client-queue-client]] network, peers communicate with each other directly. <ref>{{citationCite journal needed|date last1 =August2019Alharbi | first1 = A. | last2 = Aljaedi | first2 = A. | title = Peer-to-Peer Network Security Issues and Analysis: Review | journal = IJCSNS International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security | DOI = 10.1007/978-3-540-45172-3_6 | year = 2004 }}</ref> In peer-to-peer networking, an [[algorithm]] in the peer-to-peer communications protocol balances [[Load (computing)|load]], and even peers with modest resources can help to share the load.<ref>{{citationCite journal needed|date last1 =August2019Rao | first1 = A. | last2 = Lakshminarayanan | first2 = K. | last3 = Surana | first3 = S.| last4 = Manning Karp | first4 = R. | title = Load Balancing in Structured P2P Systems | journal = IJCSNS International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security | volume = 20 | pages = 74–88 | year = 2020 }}</ref> If a node becomes unavailable, its shared resources remain available as long as other peers offer it. Ideally, a peer does not need to achieve [[high availability]] because other, [[Redundancy (engineering)|redundant]] peers make up for any resource [[downtime]]; as the availability and load capacity of peers change, the protocol reroutes requests.
Both client-server and [[Master/slave (technology)|master-slave]] are regarded as sub-categories of distributed peer-to-peer systems.<ref>
