Piece-based file sharing over a Peer-to-Peer network in a heterogeneous network environment

File sharing is the most popular application in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Piece-based file sharing is an intuitive way to speed up the sharing process in a P2P network, such as the BT P2P network, and rarest piece first (RPF) is the most common way to distribute file pieces. As heterogeneous networks have been fast developing, the transmission conditions among nodes therefore become diversified. In the study, we propose two improved algorithms - (a) RPF with a shortest transmission time (STT) requesting node first and (b) a STT requesting node first with RPF to solve this problem. The simulation results show that our proposed schemes can perform better than RPF in a heterogeneous network environment.