On the stability and optimality of universal swarms

Recent work on BitTorrent swarms has demonstrated that a bandwidth bottleneck at the seed can lead to the underutilization of the aggregate swarm capacity. Bandwidth underutilization also occurs naturally in mobile peer-to-peer swarms, as a mobile peer may not always be within the range of peers storing the content it desires. We argue in this paper that, in both cases, idle bandwidth can be exploited to allow content sharing across multiple swarms, thereby forming a universal swarm system. We propose a model for universal swarms that applies to a variety of peerto-peer environments, both mobile and online. Through a fluid limit analysis, we demonstrate that universal swarms have significantly improved stability properties compared to individually autonomous swarms. In addition, by studying a swarm’s stationary behavior, we identify content replication ratios across different swarms that minimize the average sojourn time in the system. We then propose a content exchange scheme be...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Xia Zhou, Stratis Ioannidis, Laurent Massoulié
• Keywords: Bandwidth Bottleneck, Computer Communication Networks, Hardware, SIGMETRICS 2011, Swarm System