When FEC Speed up Data Access in P2P Networks

Abstract

Peer to peer (P2P) Network is a high level logical network architecture build over end-user nodes interconnected by a physical network infrastructure. The performance in data access over the P2P networks is one of the main issues because the downloading of data is often the longest phase of P2P usage by end-user. In the present effort, we propose an approach based on Forward Error Correction (FEC) to speed-up data access into P2P networks. The main idea is to use FEC to dilute the information over the peers. This dilution allows a greater and flexible choice among downloadable disseminated parts of the FEC-encoded data and then enhances the speed up of the transfer. A case study illustrates the technique and a performance evaluation shows that for the same amount of information disseminated into the P2P network, this solution is more efficient in terms of data access performance compared to classical file replications.