Time-Critical Data Dissemination in Cooperative Peer-to-Peer Systems

How to rapidly disseminate a large-sized file to many recipients is a fundamental problem in many applications, such as updating software patches and distributing large scientific data sets. In this paper, we present the Bee protocol, which is a cooperative peer-to-peer data dissemination protocol aiming at minimizing the maximum dissemination time for all peers to obtain time-critical data, such as critical patch updates. Bee is a decentralized protocol that organizes peers into a randomized mesh-based overlay and each peer only works with local knowledge. We devise a slowest peer first strategy to boost the speed of dissemination, and a topology adaptation algorithm that provides the most efficient utilization of the network capacity. Bee is designed to support network heterogeneity and deal with the flash crowd arrival pattern without sacrificing the dissemination speed. We present experimental results on the performance of Bee in terms of dissemination time and show that its performance can approach lower bound of the maximum dissemination time.