Tree network coding for peer-to-peer networks
Arne Vater, Christian Schindelhauer, Christian Ortolf · 2010
Partitioning is the dominant technique to transmit large files in peer-to-peer networks. A peer can redistribute each part immediately after its download. BitTorrent combines this approach with incentives for uploads and has thereby become the most successful peer-to-peer network. However, BitTorrent fails if files are unpopular and are distributed by irregularly participating peers. It is known that Network Coding always provides the optimal data distribution, referred as optimal performance. Yet, for encoding or decoding a single code block the whole file must be read and users are not willing to read O(n2) data blocks from hard disk for sending n message blocks. We call this the disk read/write complexity of an encoding.