BitTorrent's successor? From Microsoft...
El Reg has an interesting article today on a new P2P system ... from Microsoft of all people. The logic behind it sounds plausible, although part of their explanation is somewhat vague:
Microsoft Research's approach gets around this by re-encoding all the pieces, so that each one that is shared is actually a linear combination of all the pieces, fed into a particular function. The blocks are then distributed with a tag that describes the parameters it contains.
Apparently this means that each downloader will be recombining already-downloaded chunks into brand-new chunks. All other downloaders will be able to utilise parts of these 'mixed' chunks to recreate the original chunks they may be missing. The original research paper is here.
Comment
Exactly why this is better than BitTorrent isn't exactly clear. It seems to me that a very large swarm would be needed to make this useful. But then again, if the swarm is that large surely the original BT protocol would be just as efficient?A secondary concern is the CPU power 're-encoding' will take. Users of BitTorrent on the PC will already know what a resource hog it can be once you get up to a few hundred connections, causing your PC to become extremely sluggish when performing routine UI tasks such as dragging a window. The situation is better on a Mac where the UI doesn't suffer any slowdowns, but the CPU drain is still significant.
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