3 research outputs found
A Stable Fountain Code Mechanism for Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution
Most peer-to-peer content distribution systems require the peers to privilege
the welfare of the overall system over greedily maximizing their own utility.
When downloading a file broken up into multiple pieces, peers are often asked
to pass on some possible download opportunities of common pieces in order to
favor rare pieces. This is to avoid the missing piece syndrome, which throttles
the download rate of the peer-to-peer system to that of downloading the file
straight from the server. In other situations, peers are asked to stay in the
system even though they have collected all the file's pieces and have an
incentive to leave right away.
We propose a mechanism which allows peers to act greedily and yet stabilizes
the peer-to-peer content sharing system. Our mechanism combines a fountain code
at the server to generate innovative new pieces, and a prioritization for the
server to deliver pieces only to new peers. While by itself, neither the
fountain code nor the prioritization of new peers alone stabilizes the system,
we demonstrate that their combination does, through both analytical and
numerical evaluation.Comment: accepted to IEEE INFOCOM 2014, 9 page