Self-organization in Cooperative Content Distribution Networks

Traditional client-server content distribution techniques usually suffer from scalability problems when dealing with large client population or sizable content. The advent of peer-to-peer (P2P) network offers the technical means to efficiently distribute data to millions of clients simultaneously with very low infrastructural cost. Previous studies of content distribution architectures have primarily focused on homogeneous systems, where the bandwidth capacities of all peers are similar. In this paper, we address the problem of heterogeneity and we propose mechanisms to improve content distribution efficiency by dynamically reorganizing the P2P network based on the effective bandwidth of the peers. Our techniques have been designed to be efficient in heterogeneous settings, adaptive so as to tolerate runtime changes like bandwidth fluctuations, and practical enough to be implementable in real systems. We analyze their effectiveness by the means of simulations and experimental evaluation.