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
Peer-to-peer networks provide better scalability for the filesharing applications they underlie. Unlike traditional server-based approach such as FTP, maintaining a constant QoS with a fixed number of servers seems feasible, whatever the number of peers involved. However, a P2P filesharing network sometimes happens to saturate, notably in a semi-P2P filesharing architecture or during flashcrowds phase, and scalability may fail. Even "smart" networks can encounter the whole file but one piece downloaded case, which we call starvation. We suggest a simple and versatile filesharing model. It applies to all pieces-oriented filesharing protocols used in softwares such as MlDonkey or BitTorrent. Simulations of this model show that starvation may occur even during flashcrowds. We propose a theoretical explanation for the so-called starvation phenomenum. Typical protocols for peer-to-peer file sharing over the Internet divide files to be shared into pieces. New peers strive to obtain a complete collection of pieces from other peers and from a seed. In this paper we identify a problem that can occur if the seeding rate is not large enough. The problem is that, even if the statistics of the system are symmetric in the pieces, there can be symmetry breaking, with one piece becoming very rare. If peers depart after obtaining a complete collection, they can tend to leave before helping other peers receive the rare piece. 1