|
Peer-to-peer is a major theme of the lab. Our research in this area falls broadly into two categories.
The first concerns the case of controlled systems, where peer devices have predictable behaviour, and there is no need to provide incentives for peers to collaborate. One important example of such controlled environments is the collection of residential home gateways under the management of a single ISP. We look at architectures that take advantage of such controlled environments to offer services such as video-on-demand, live video streaming, and multi-player games. Specifically we investigate ways of pre-loading content on users’ end devices to optimise system performance.
The second area is that of uncontrolled environments, such as the collection of end users’ PCs. There, we work on the design of distributed scheduling strategies, and on the performance impact of incentive schemes such as Tit-for-Tat, for services such as live video streaming and video-on-demand.
|