BitTorrent with support nodes for provider-initiated P2P services

The content distribution services via the Internet have become popular. However, these services have some problems that prevent users from getting a file efficiently and there still remains much room for improving the performance. In this paper, we focus on representative hybrid P2P network application, BitTorrent, and try to resolve these problems. Because the content files are divided into pieces and finely handled at the piece level, BitTorrent allows users to exchange data efficiently in massively parallel transmission manner. However, there exist some problems with BitTorrent two of which are mainly focused on this paper. The first problem is that BitTorrent has a possibility to lack the nodes who has a entire file. The second one is that some nodes can´t receive data for some unfair reason because of the limit on connected nodes. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the method for placing transfer support nodes by service providers to allow users to get contents efficiently and evaluates the proposed method by using computer simulation.