BitTorrent Based Solution for Efficient Content Sharing on Next Generation Networks

As the architecture of participation became the main design principle in Web2.0, more and more content sharing solutions have appeared on the Internet. These systems encourage end users to create, publish, tag and consume content. Most of them offer a web interface to access the service and are typically implemented with the traditional client-server software architecture. Due to client-server architecture they require additional investments on the backend side as the service attracts more and more users. In this paper we propose an innovative content sharing solution, called Swarm, which offers the following benefits to service providers: cost efficiency, mobility support and necessary control points to prevent misuse of the service. We propose an architecture that combines the advantages of P2P and client-server systems into a single, competitive hybrid solution. First, we introduce the proposed architecture with the most important features, discuss our experience with the reference implementation and finally demonstrate calculations describing the cost efficiency of the Swarm solution.