The Scalability of Swarming Peer-to-Peer Content Delivery

Most web sites are unable to serve content to a large number of users due to the inherent limitations of client-server file transfer. Recent peer-to-peer content delivery protocols have demonstrated the feasibility of spreading this load among the clients themselves, giving small web sites the possibility of serving large audiences with very low cost. In this paper we use a simulation-based performance evaluation to study the fundamental question of the scalability of swarming peer-topeer content delivery. Our results demonstrate the superior scalability of swarming with respect to load, file size, block size, and client bandwidth.