From Centralization to Distribution: A Comparison of File Sharing Protocols

File sharing service is a fundamental module for many modern collaboration and communication services. The traditional server/client repository model of file sharing has been widely used in many systems, but when it comes to fully decentralized systems, a decentralized file sharing service is also greatly needed. In this paper, we have selected three different protocols, SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) and BitTorrent (BT), implemented an experimental file sharing service for each of them, and evaluated their performance and scalability over different shared file size and number of sharing participants. The results show that BT has shortest time cost with the best scalability, while the TFTP is the slowest in downloading and uploading files whereas the SFTP speed is in between.