Estimating self-sustainability in peer-to-peer swarming systems

Peer-to-peer swarming is one of the de facto solutions for distributed content dissemination in today’s Internet. By leveraging resources provided by clients, swarming systems reduce the load on and costs to publishers. However, there is a limit to how much cost savings can be gained from swarming; for example, for unpopular content peers will always depend on the publisher in order to complete their downloads. In this paper, we investigate such a dependence of peers on a publisher. For this purpose, we propose a new metric, namely swarm self-sustainability. A swarm is referred to as self-sustaining if all its blocks are collectively held by peers; the self-sustainability of a swarm is the fraction of time in which the swarm is self-sustaining. We pose the following question: how does the self-sustainability of a swarm vary as a function of content popularity, the service capacity of the users, and the size of the file? We present a model to answer the posed question. We then propose efficient solution methods to compute self-sustainability. The accuracy of our estimates is validated against simulations. Finally, we also provide closed-form expressions for the fraction of time that a given number of blocks is collectively held by peers.