Searching content on peer-to-peer networks for in-flight entertainment

In this work we introduce a peer-to-peer approach for in-flight entertainment video on-demand systems. Such applications are traditional ways for the airline to improve profit from its operation and attract customers. We outline how a peer-to-peer system should be organized to address this specific application and reduce direct operational costs by reducing weight of the system. Furthermore, we discuss in detail the problem of content searching that arises in such framework and propose two feasible solutions. These solutions are analyzed in the terms of amount of data transmitted over the network infrastructure and required transmission rate. Our conclusions show that the searching problem can be solved without significant use of bandwidth, and ultimately the peer-to-peer paradigm is a beneficial and feasible path for the next in-flight entertainment system generations.