Access control to BitTorrent swarms using closed swarms
Njål T. Borch, Keith Michell, Ingar M. Arntzen, Dušan Gabrijelčič · 2010
Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology potentially offers a promising basis for efficient, scalable and low-cost delivery of live content to large numbers of simultaneous users. However, the decentralized nature of P2P and the existence of untrusted peers makes commercial exploitation difficult. In this paper we describe Closed Swarms (CS), a P2P based content delivery system based on the BitTorrent protocols which makes it possible to differentiate between authorized and non-authorized nodes (or peers) within an overlay network. We show how Closed Swarms can be utilised as an access control mechanism to create a high quality content distribution network which provides legitimate users with an improved service over non-authorised users and which we believe may be used to drive the commercial adoption of P2P content distribution