Most peer-to-peer content distribution sys- tems require the peers to privilege the welfare of the overall system over greedily maximizing their own utility. When downloading a file broken up into multiple pieces, peers are often asked to pass on some possible download opportunities of common pieces in order to favor rare pieces. This is to avoid the missing piece syndrome, which throttles the download rate of the peer-to-peer system to that of downloading the file straight from the server. In other situations, peers are asked to stay in the system even though they have collected all the file's pieces and have an incentive to leave right away. We propose a mechanism which allows peers to act greedily and yet stabilizes the peer-to-peer content shar- ing system. Our mechanism combines a fountain code at the server to generate innovative new pieces, and a prioritization for the server to deliver pieces only to new peers. While by itself, neither the fountain code nor the prioritization of new peers alone stabilizes the system, we demonstrate that their combination does, through both analytical and numerical evaluation. I. INTRODUCTION
Recent work on BitTorrent swarms has demonstrated that a bandwidth bottleneck at the seed can lead to the underutilization of the aggregate swarm capacity. Bandwidth underutilization also occurs naturally in mobile peer-to-peer swarms, as a mobile peer may not always be within the range of peers storing the content it desires. We argue in this paper that, in both cases, idle bandwidth can be exploited to allow content sharing across multiple swarms, thereby forming a universal swarm system. We propose a model for universal swarms that applies to a variety of peer-to-peer environments, both mobile and online. Through a fluid limit analysis, we demonstrate that universal swarms have significantly improved stability properties compared to individually autonomous swarms. In addition, by studying a swarm's stationary behavior, we identify content replication ratios across different swarms that minimize the average sojourn time in the system. We then propose a content exchange scheme between peers that leads to these optimal replication ratios, and study its convergence numerically.