File sharing using IP-Multicast

Abstract: File sharing systems cause a huge portion of traffic in the Internet. With re-spect to the peer-to-peer approach, unicast delivery of content is the common case. Un-fortunately, an inherent characteristic of filesharing systems employing unicast com-munication is that the sum of all download rates cannot exceed the sum of all upload rates. As asymmetric internet connections become increasingly popular, this restric-tion is clearly noticeable in form of low download rates. Together with the observation that popular files are requested by many users within a short time frame, this motivates the usage of multicast communication. This paper analyzes the effects of using IP multicast in a filesharing system.