Removing the constraint of acyclicity fromthe acyclic peer-to-peer architecture, we obtain the general peer-to-peer architecture. Like the acyclic peer-to-peer architecture, this architecture allows bidirectional communication between two servers, but the topology can form a general undirected graph, possibly having multiple paths between servers. An example is shown in Figure 7. The advantage of the general peer-to-peer architecture over the previous two architectures is that it requires less coordination and offers more flexi- bility in the configuration of connections among servers. Moreover, allowing redundant connections makes it more robust with respect to failures of single servers. The drawback of having redundant connections is that special algo- rithms must be implemented to.
