Suppose some (could be 1) machines have one file and another (could be very large) machines want the file.
This could be very slow! The speed is limited by the throughput possible by those machines. Peer to peer could speed this up!
- N hosts are called ‘seeds’
- Hosts are called peers
- As soon as one of the M peers has a portion of the file it can share it with other peers
The file is broken into many pieces
- Generally fixed size except for the last one
- Protected by a cryptographic hash (allows reliable detection of corruption)
A summary (torrent file) gives the necessary start up information
- How many pieces there are
- The hash of each piece
- Somewhere to start looking for peers
Basic operation
- Finding other peers
- Seeds or trackers to start with
- Peer exchange: each peer ‘gossips’ about the peers they know about
- Group of peers for one file is a “swarm”
- Each peer talks to some subset of the “swarm” at any time
- Finding pieces
- Each peer shares the identity of the pieces they own with its peers
- A peer asks a peer who has the file to share it
Strategy
- A peer asks for the ‘rarest’ piece which increases the overall ‘health’ of the file
- Prioritize ones that are sending the most data to it (preferred peers) — tit-for-tat
- Discourages ‘selfish’ behaviour where peers accept pieces but don’t share many pieces
- Opportunistic unchoking
- Randomly choose a peer sometimes (prevents problems at the start where there aren’t many peers)
- Unpopular/rare files can be hard to find seeds for