Peer-to-Peer-based Multi-Path Large File Transfer

The goal of this thesis is to design, implement, and evaluate an efficient mechanism for data transport over multiple paths based on existing protocols.

Data transfer rate between a sender and a receiver on the Internet may be improved by finding multiple paths and send the data over these paths in parallel. In order to allow multiple paths to be used at the same time between the same sender/receiver pair intermediate relay nodes need to be present and act as intermediate destinations for data to be transferred.

In order to maximize the efficiency of the data transfer the intermediate nodes should do minimal processing of the datastream (if possible at relay nodes the stream should be dealt within the network layer).

The nodes willing to participe as relay nodes may be organized in a P2P overlay. Each node before sending data needs to discover in the overlay subsets of peers that can be used to build paths to the desired destination. This search phase is followed by a channel set-up phase and then by the data transfer phase.