Section: Application Domains

Peer-to-Peer Systems

The amount of multimedia traffic accessed via the Internet, already of the order of exabytes (${10}^{18}$ bytes) per month, is expected to grow steadily in the coming years. A peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, where peers contribute resources to support service of such traffic, holds the promise to support its growth more cheaply than by scaling up the size of data centers. More precisely, a large scale P2P system based on resources of individual users can absorb part of the load that would otherwise need to be served by data centers. In video-on-demand applications, the critical resources at the peers are storage space and uplink bandwidth. Our objective is to ensure that the largest fraction of traffic is supported by the P2P system.