Efficient peer-to-peer file sharing in 3G networks

In 3G networks upgraded with high speed packet access (HSPA) technology, the high access bandwidth and advanced mobile devices make it applicable to share large files among mobile users by peer-to-peer applications. To receive files as quickly as possible is essential for mobile users in file sharing applications, since they are subject to unstable signal strength and battery failures. While many researches present peer-to-peer file sharing architectures in mobile environments, few works focus on decreasing the time spent in disseminating files among users. In this paper, we present an efficient peer-to-peer file sharing design for HSPA networks called efficient file sharing (EFS) for 3G networks. EFS can decrease the dissemination time by efficiently utilizing the upstream-bandwidth of mobile nodes. It uses an adaptive rearrangement of a node’s concurrent uploading transfers, which causes the count of the node’s concurrent uploading transfers to lower while ensuring that the node’s upstream-bandwidth can be efficiently utilized. Our simulations show that, EFS achieves much less dissemination time than other protocols including Bullet Prime and a direct implementation of BitTorrent for mobile environments.     

Free-riders impact on throughputs of peer-to-peer file-sharing systems

In a peer-to-peer file-sharing system, a free-rider is a node which downloads files from its peers but does not share files to other nodes. Analyzing the free-riders’ impact on system throughputs is essential in examining the performance of peer-to-peer file-sharing systems. We find that the free-riders’ impact largely depends on nodes behavior, including their online time and greed of downloading files. We extend an existing peer-to-peer system model and classify nodes according to their behavior. We focus on two peer-to-peer architectures: centralized indexing and distributed hash tables. We find that when the cooperators in a system are all greedy in downloading files, the system throughput has little room to increase while the cooperators throughput degrade badly with the increasing percent of greedy free-riders in the system. When all the cooperators are non-greedy with long average online time, the system throughput has much room to increase and the cooperators throughput degrade little with a high percent of greedy free-riders in the system. We also find that if a system can tolerate a high percent of greedy free-riders without suffering much throughput degradation, the system must contain some non-greedy cooperators that contribute great idle service capacity to the system. Foundation item: the National High Technology Research and Development Program (863) of China (No. 2007AA01Z457), and the Shanghai Science and Technology Development Funds (No. 07QA14033)