Analyzing Energy Efficiency of a Cooperative Content Distribution Technique

Peer to Peer (P2P) technology has revolutionized the landscape of content sharing in the past decade. Its usage, however, is still limited to either non-commercial or illegal distribution. Although a few works have demonstrated possible ways of integrating P2P with traditional content delivery, a proper evaluation of such algorithms from energy consumption point of view is yet to be done. This work demonstrates the benefits of such algorithms from the perspective of energy consumption and bandwidth economics. The measurement study makes use of a novel solution, named GroupDL, which allows a group of friends to purchase a multi-licensed copy of the original content from the server, and then collaborate to duplicate it among themselves. Simulation shows that it requires only around 1/n-th of the original bandwidth for an n-member group, while device measurement reveals that the client energy consumption is also affected positively and is proportional to the bandwidth reduction.