Peer-Assisted Content Distribution with Random Linear Network Coding

Peer-to-peer networks constitute a widely used, cost-effective and scalable technology to distribute bandwidth-intensive content. The technology forms a great platform to build distributed cloud storage without the need of a central provider. However, the majority of todays peer-to-peer systems require complex algorithms to schedule what parts of obtained content to forward to other peers. Random Linear Network Coding can greatly simplify these algorithm by removing the need for coordination between the distributing nodes.

In this paper we propose and evaluate the structure of the BRONCO peer-to-peer system, which applies random linear network coding. We focus on an experimental evaluation of the performance on 36 real nodes. The evalution shows that BRONCO outperforms regular HTTP transfers, and, with a extremely simple protocol structure, performs equivalently to bittorrent distribution. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of different parameters and suggest a suitable trade-off between CPU utilization and network overhead. Within the limitations of the used test environment, we have shown that networkc coding is usable in peer-assisted content distribution and we suggest further improvements to reduce redundancy overhead.