Peer-to-peer content distribution in clustered topologies with source coding

Network coding has been applied successfully in peer-to-peer systems to shorten the distribution time, particularly in extreme conditions where peers in the network are clustered and separated by physical links with limited bandwidth. In this paper, we focus more closely on the use of source coding, i.e. encoding is done only at the source, as an alternative to network coding to facilitate content distribution under such limited bandwidth configuration. We observe analytically and experimentally that, in this specific case, with appropriately chosen expansion factors, source coding can have comparable performance to network coding in terms of distribution time, yet consuming much less computational resources than the latter approach does.