Extending mobile BitTorrent environment with network coding

Peer-to-peer based content sharing is considered as one of the most efficient and popular content distribution solution nowadays. However in such network it is common that parts of the content is not distributed to several peers yet, thus during the download we have to wait a lot for that rare pieces. In addition to that it is also possible that we will not be able to download the rare pieces because the original seeder has already left the network. In this paper we investigate how to increase download efficiency in BitTorrent, in case of rare pieces by using network coding methods. In mobile networks the peer connections are not so reliable, because the phones as peers can leave the network any time e.g. if the network coverage is weak. Bringing BitTorrent technology to mobile phones has already been demonstrated with the implementation of SymTorrent and MobTorrent. In this research we investigate how to extend these implementations with network coding, to increase efficiency in case of rare pieces.