Peer Assisted Content Distribution over Router Assisted Overlay Multicast
George Xylomenos, Konstantinos V. Katsaros, Vasileios P. Kemerlis · 2008
Abstract — While multicasting is considered valuable for content distribution, it is not widely supported on the Internet, despite the emergence of scalable overlay schemes. Content providers have instead turned to peer assisted content distribution in order to efficiently serve large numbers of clients, thus removing the bandwidth bottleneck from their side but placing a heavy burden on the clients. Even if we assume that multicast will become prevalent in the future Internet, peer assisted content distribution will still be useful for asynchronously distributing very large amounts of data. We have thus designed a multicast variant of BitTorrent, paying special attention to the incentives required to ensure that peers will not only consume, but also contribute content. To provide a multicast substrate for our application in the current Internet, we also present an overlay multicast scheme inspired by Scribe that exploits co-operative access routers so as to improve the distribution trees. I.