The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Peer-to-peer swarming, as used by BitTorrent, is one of the \emph{de facto} solutions for content dissemination in today's Internet. By leveraging resources provided by users, peer-to-peer swarming is a simple, scalable and efficient mechanism for content distribution. Although peer-to-peer swarming has been widely studied for a decade, prior work has focused on the dissemination of one commodity (a single file). This work focuses on the multi-commodity case.

We have discovered through measurements that a vast number of publishers currently disseminate multiple files in a single swarm (bundle). The first contribution of this work is a model for content availability. We use the model to show that, when publishers are intermittent, bundling $K$ files increases content availability exponentially as function of $K$. When there is a stable publisher, we consider content availability among peers (excluding the publisher). Our second contribution is the estimate of the dependency of peers on the stable publisher, which is useful for provisioning purposes as well as in deciding how to bundle. To this goal, we propose a new metric, swarm self-sustainability, and present a model that yields swarm self-sustainability as a function of the file size, popularity and service capacity of peers. Then, we investigate reciprocity and the use of barter that occurs among peers. As our third contribution, we prove that the loss of efficiency due to the download of unrequested content to enforce direct reciprocity, as opposed to indirect reciprocity, is at most two in a class of networks without relays.

Bio:
Daniel S. Menasche received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2011. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His interests are in modeling, analysis and performance evaluation of computer systems. He was awarded the Yahoo! outstanding synthesis project award at UMass in 2010. He was also co-author of papers that received best paper awards at Globecom’07, CoNEXT’09 and INFOCOM'13. CeClub website: http://ceclub.technion.ac.il