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On peer-to-peer (P2P) content delivery

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Abstract

In both academia and industry, peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have attracted great attentions. P2P applications such as Napster, Gnutella, FastTrack, BitTorrent, Skype and PPLive, have witnessed tremendous success among the end users. Unlike a client-server based system, peers bring with them serving capacity. Therefore, as the demand of a P2P system grows, the capacity of the network grows, too. This enables a P2P application to be cheap to build and superb in scalability. In this paper, we survey the state of the art of the research and the development of P2P content delivery application. Using examples of the deployed P2P applications and research prototypes, we survey the best practices in P2P overlay building and P2P scheduling. We hope that the information may help the readers to build a reliable, robust P2P content delivery application.

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Notes

  1. Some optimization of Kademlia allows the k-bucket with different prefix to split to a max depth d.

  2. Since Reed-Solomon is a maximum distance separable (MDS) erasure code, only exact k distinctive coded blocks are needed. If fountain code or random linear code is used, we may need (1 + ɛ)k blocks, with ɛ being a very small number for random linear code, and being around 0.03–0.25 for fountain code.

  3. Avalanche 0 uses a push based confirmation process to ensure exact k blocks are needed to decode the original. In Avalanche, the sender first proposes to the receiver the code vector of the transmitted block. The receiver checks whether the code vector is linearly independent to the code vectors of the already received blocks, and accepts or rejects the code vector. This way, no bandwidth is wasted. Nevertheless, it may increase the latency in the delivery.

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  1. Microsoft Research, Communication and Collaboration Systems, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA, 98052, USA

    Jin Li

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Li, J. On peer-to-peer (P2P) content delivery. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 1, 45–63 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-007-0003-1

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