The effect of heterogeneous link capacities in BitTorrent-like file sharing systems

Despite the recent research efforts on peer-to-peer networks modeling and performance evaluation, very few literature results have appeared on what concerns the effect of network characteristics on the overlay peer-to-peer services. Goal of this paper is to contribute in assessing the effect of different access link capacities on performance of a peer-to-peer file sharing system. In order to make the problem tractable, an analytical model referring to a simplified network model with access links belonging to two different capacity classes is developed. Our preliminary results seem to imply that, depending on evaluation metrics, bandwidth heterogeneity can have a positive effect on content propagation among peers.