Computer Science

Colloquium Details

Swarming: Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution for the Masses

Abstract

Most web sites run by "ordinary" users are not able to serve high volumes of traffic, since doing so requires spending thousands of dollars, either for a faster Internet connection or for a Content Distribution Network. In this talk I will discuss swarming, a new content delivery system that is based on peer-to-peer file transfer. With swarming, any client that has downloaded even a portion of a file may serve that portion to other clients. This means that the capacity of a swarming system actually increases as more clients join the system. I will present recent results from our performance evaluation of swarming, illustrating the benefits and limitations of a basic swarming protocol and identifying several key opportunities for performance improvements. I will also use swarming as a motivating example of the power of peer-to-peer applications and outline future directions for my research.