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
We propose a new model for peer-to-peer networking which takes the network bottlenecks into account beyond the access. This model can cope with key features of P2P networking like degree or locality constraints together with the fact that distant peers often have a smaller rate than nearby peers. Using a network model based on rate functions, we give a closed form expression of peers download performance in the system's fluid limit, as well as approximations for the other cases. Our results show the existence of realistic settings for which the average download time is a decreasing function of the load, a phenomenon that we call super-scalability.