Peer-to-peer file sharing in next generation eXpressive Internet Architecture

As a popular peer-to-peer protocol, BitTorrent is one of the most important methods for file sharing and distributing in today’s Internet. However, the BitTorrent protocol is built entirely at the application level. Without the support of network layer, peers in BitTorrent protocol have to exchange data content through TCP connections and BitTorrent applications has to handle every procedure in the whole file sharing process. As peer-to-peer has become an essential way for people to share and distribute files across the Internet, we believe it should be natively supported mechanism in the future Internet Architecture. The eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA) is one of three Future Internet Architecture projects funded by US NSF. As a clean-slate network architecture, XIA has some novel features such as evolvability, flexible routing, and in-network cache for content delivery. In this paper, we propose a practical design of BitTorrent protocol implementation on XIA to explore and rethink the peer-to-peer file sharing mechanism in the future Internet architecture.