A P2P Network Booting Scheme Using a BitTorrent-Like Protocol

Network booting is widely used today, mostly for thin-client computing, cluster computing, and operating system installation. Popular protocols like trivial file transfer protocol (TFTP) and hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) are used to download operating system images. Network booting clients simultaneously downloading from a single server create a bottleneck at the server's link once the link capacity has been maximized. The result is a slowdown in the download time and the overall boot process. Several P2P network booting solutions exist, but they are implemented on top of a running operating system. In this paper, we propose a distributed downloading scheme at the network bootloader level using a BitTorrent-like protocol for network booting clients. We discuss the implementation of a new download protocol for iPXE, an open-source network bootloader, and evaluate the performance of TFTP, HTTP, and the proposed BitTorrent-like protocol by measuring their download times over varying file sizes and number of nodes. On 20 clients, simultaneously downloading a 500 MiB file using the proposed protocol resulted to a decrease in average download time of 51.6% compared to TFTP and 46.6% compared to HTTP.