Avalanche is the name of a proposed
peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer n ...
(P2P) network created by
Pablo Rodriguez and Christos Gkantsidis at
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
, which claims to offer improved
scalability
Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system.
In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that a company can increase sales given increased resources. For example, a ...
and bandwidth efficiency compared to existing P2P systems.
The proposed system works in a similar way to
BitTorrent, but aims to improve some of its shortfalls. Like BitTorrent, Avalanche splits the file to be distributed into small blocks. However, rather than peers simply transmitting the blocks, they transmit random
linear combinations of the blocks along with the random coefficients of this linear combination - a technique known as '
network coding In computer networking, linear network coding is a program in which intermediate nodes transmit data from source nodes to sink nodes by means of linear combinations.
Linear network coding may be used to improve a network's throughput, efficiency, ...
'. This technique removes the need for each peer to have complex knowledge of block distribution across the network (an aspect of BitTorrent-like
protocols
Protocol may refer to:
Sociology and politics
* Protocol (politics), a formal agreement between nation states
* Protocol (diplomacy), the etiquette of diplomacy and affairs of state
* Etiquette, a code of personal behavior
Science and technology
...
which the paper claims does not scale very well).
Bram Cohen
Bram Cohen is an American computer programmer, best known as the author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol in 2001, as well as the first file sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent. He is also the co-founder of ...
, the creator of
BitTorrent, criticized the proposed Avalanche system in a post to his
blog
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...
.
He mentions inaccuracies in the paper's analysis of the BitTorrent protocol (some of it being based on a 4-years-out-of-date version of the protocol which used an algorithm that "sucks") and describes the paper as "garbage."
References
External links
Avalanche: File Swarming with Network Coding Avalanche official home page
File sharing networks
Microsoft Research
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