The Generic Multiparty Transport Protocol (swift)
Victor Grishchenko, Arno Bakker · 2011
The swift is a generic multiparty (swarming) transport protocol. The TCP, today's dominating transport protocol, is connection/ conversation-oriented. But traffic-wise, the currently dominating usecase is content dissemination. There is a multitude of incompatible approaches to resolve that discrepancy above/below the transport layer: peer-to-peer, CDN, caches, mirrors, multicast, etc. The swift aims at creating a single unified content-centric transport protocol serving as a lingua-franca of content distribution. To implement that ultimate data cloud model, the protocol has to unify use cases of data download, video-on-demand and live streaming. It must work in the settings of client-server, peer-to-peer, CDN or peer-assisted networks, effectively blending those architectures.