A practical incentive towards efficient data sharing in large scale enterprise

In this work, we focus on the problem of redundancy of data being transmitted using several state of the art content distribution systems and show how severely it impacts the network economics and the experience of end-user. We base our findings on real world large scale measurement studies conducted over Emulab, which is a network test bed hosted by the University of Utah. We identify that P2P systems like BitTorrent have gained popularity in the recent years and have been widely deployed. We then focus on the problem of data redundancy in BitTorrent and propose a novel solution to restrict the same by exploiting IP Multicast functionality wherever available. We call the proposed protocol HTorrent. The new protocol is interoperable with BitTorrent and only requires a few changes at the client end.