Peer-to-Peer Technology for Near-zero Cost TV Distribution (DTC.7299)

Project nummer: dtc7299

Omschrijving van het onderzoek

Millions of people are now using the Internet to access news articles, music, and live webcam feeds. However, this phenomenon shows the fundamental limit of centralized content distribution architectures, such as web and video streaming servers. This limit is their high cost for setup and maintenance. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology provides a natural solution for this limit. The main idea of P2P is that users share their resources to create a service. This sharing of resources creates a near-zero cost content distribution infrastructure.
We have conducted the world's largest measurement of the Bittorrent P2P system. Bittorrent uses nowadays over 33% of all Internet bandwidth. This measurement has provided us with a unique insight into the shortcomings of current P2P technology. We identified the following research challenges: decentralization, availability, integrity and trust, incentives for sharing, and network transparency.
We will investigate how P2P technology can be taken to a higher level by building a prototype. This prototype should eventually support real-time video streaming of TV feeds. The prototype will be based on an existing open source Bittorrent client. This is a novel approach because the current use of Bittorrent is mainly the illegal spreading of copyrighted content. However, history shows that businesses have always adapted to new technology and financially exploited its advantages.
We will address the above mentioned challenges using three innovations. The first innovation is the usage of a new paradigm we call social locality. This means that we no longer build P2P systems from anonymous computers, but from persons. We exploit real-world relations between people to form a people-oriented P2P network. The second innovation is that all content is augmented with references to similar content. This semantic clustering increases the efficiency of searching. Our final innovation is the use
of secure personal identifiers to overcome Internet addressing limitations.

Gebruikers

Three companies are involved in this project.

Projectleider

Dr.ir. J.A. Pouwelse

Technische Universiteit Delft Elektrotechniek, Wiskunde en Informatica

Postbus 5031 2600 GA Delft

Status van het project

Gestart	: 01-06-2006
Einddatum	: 01-06-2009

Trefwoorden

BitTorrent, Content distribution, Peer-to-peer networks, Video streaming.

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