Efficient Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution Using Network Coding

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology has been successfully used in various applications in the last few years. However it is also regarded as being disruptive for traditional fixed and mobile operators because of the large bandwidth consumption and disordered data exchange. To solve the P2P issues for operators, we utilize the important feature, data exchange, in P2P application to design a novel P2P-multicast protocol with using network coding. In this work, a peer group (PG) is created for those nodes that have part of the desired content, and then a PG member is selected to send coded segment according to the peer selection algorithm and network coding scheme, whose objective is to minimize the uplink bandwidth consumption. At last, the selected node sends the coded segment to the PG members by multicast. We demonstrate through simulations that the uplink bandwidth is saved by about 30% with our proposed protocol.