Using P 2 P for Bulk Content Distribution – Research Problems , Solutions and Future Directions ∗

The research focus of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network design had long been on low-complexity content mapping and efficient search mechanisms. System such as CAN, Chord, Pastry are pioneers in the area and have been cited by almost every P2P work. These systems provide an efficient substrate for sharing/distributing small files like MP3 or images, because searching time is essential to the overall performance. However, for large-volume contents like multimedia documents or scientific data sets, the efficiency of the searching process becomes a negligible factor to the system’s performance, while the data transfer efficiency becomes the determinant of the overall distribution efficiency. In this paper, we describe a new set of research problems when P2P is used for distribution of large-volume contents, and discuss some preliminary work-in-progress on these problems.