Optimal Strategies for Efficient Peer-to-Peer File Sharing

We study a model for peer-to-peer file sharing. The goal is to distribute a file from a server to multiple peers. We assume the upload capacity of each peer is the only bottleneck. We examine the finish times of peers under different transmission strategies. Pareto optimality, min-max finish time, and optimal average finish time of the model are studied. We believe the results provide fundamental insights into practical peer-to-peer systems such as BitTorrent.