Cooperative content distribution: scalability through self-organization

Peer-to-peer networks have often been touted as the ultimate solution to scalability. Although cooperative techniques have been initially used almost exclusively for content lookup and sharing, one of the most promising application of the peer-to-peer paradigm is to capitalize the bandwidth of client peers to quickly distribute large content and withstand flash-crowds (i.e., a sudden increase in popularity of some online content). Cooperative content distribution is based on the premise that the capacity of a network is as high as the sum of the resources of its nodes: the more peers in the network, the higher its aggregate bandwidth, and the better it can scale and serve new peers. Such networks can thus spontaneously adapt to the demand by taking advantage of available resources. In this paper, we evaluate the use of peer-to-peer networks for content distribution under various system assumptions, such as peer arrival rates, bandwidth capacities, cooperation strategies, or peer lifetimes. We argue that the self-scaling and self-organizing properties of cooperative networks pave the way for cost-effective, yet highly efficient and robust content distribution.