A simulation study on network coding parameters in P2P content distribution system

We consider a peer to peer (P2P) content distribution simulation system based on network coding. In such a system, the data transmitted among peers is an encoded version of the original content. With network coding, the system can achieve the maximum theoretical network flow bound. However, in practical applications, the operation of network coding causes additional computational consumption and storage overhead, and whether the P2P system can benefit from network coding remains a controversial issue. In this paper, we introduce some new network coding parameters to gain more insights to the properties of network coding and have an extensive analysis from simulation. Based on these parameters, we construct an implementation of the network coding-based content distribution scheme in NS-2 platform. According to our simulation results, in some cases, network coding can not obtain a better performance compared to the traditional P2P scheme. However, when the parameters of network coding are chosen properly, the network coding-based system will gain a better performance compared to the traditional P2P system by at most 20% to 30%, which means that the use of network coding can give considerable benefit to the P2P content distribution system.