James Delahunty
20 Jun 2005 14:18
Hate or love P2P, there is no doubting that using the technology to distribute content is much cheaper and becoming more and more reliable as development goes on. One of the best used methods of sharing files by the community is by using BitTorrent due to its speed and ease of use. It should come as no shock that Microsoft has begun its own P2P development project, codenamed Avalanche. Based on BitTorrent, Avalanche is also working to tackle some of the remaining problems with BitTorrent.
Just like BitTorrent, Avalanche divides files up into chunks for easier sharing. The advantage of this approach is obvious; anyone with a full chunk can upload that same chunk to hundreds of people. Now if you take into account that hundreds, often thousands are sharing the same files on a BT tracker, this system does prove successful at speeding up the overall sharing amongst users. There is also the obvious disadvantage with this system; what if no-one currently sharing has a full file and several chunks are missing from all sharers?
According to Microsoft, using "network coding", Avalanche can re-create missing blocks of data that can be used in place of missing chunks. If this is true in practise then it's another point for reliability of P2P distribution. Microsoft also claims that Avalanche will make it harder for file data to become corrupted. While it is good to see at least one major company try to develop on the idea that P2P distribution is suitable for legitimate content, the damage to filesharing’s reputation has already been done.
BitTorrent sites all around the world have been shut down because the entertainment industry highlighted the sharing of copyrighted material among the users. This is where BitTorrent loses out while compared to a P2P network for example, to share reliably, you need o find a BitTorrent site, which is basically a centralised distribution point for .torrent files that are needed for the sharing. Several attempts have been made at "trackerless" BitTorrent, and appear to be getting better and better as time goes on.
Source:
BBC News