On peer-to-peer (P2P) content delivery

In both academia and industry, peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have attracted great attentions. P2P applications such as Napster, Gnutella, FastTrack, BitTorrent, Skype and PPLive, have witnessed tremendous success among the end users. Unlike a client-server based system, peers bring with them serving capacity. Therefore, as the demand of a P2P system grows, the capacity of the network grows, too. This enables a P2P application to be cheap to build and superb in scalability. In this paper, we survey the state of the art of the research and the development of P2P content delivery application. Using examples of the deployed P2P applications and research prototypes, we survey the best practices in P2P overlay building and P2P scheduling. We hope that the information may help the readers to build a reliable, robust P2P content delivery application. Keyword Peer-to-peer (P2P) . P2P file sharing . P2P streaming . P2P broadcast . Survey . Overlay . Scheduling . Efficiency . Reliability . Robustness . Qualityof service (QoS)