Scientists have created an improved version of BitTorrent

Transferring files over P2P networks can occur much faster than now. Computer researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Purdue universities have created a new protocol, Similarity-Enhanced Transfer (SET), which implements BitTorrent principles at a higher level. Unlike BitTorrent, the SET protocol can split into multiple downloads not only exactly identical files with a matching checksum, but also files that only partially match.

Some files actually do not match at 100%, but at 99.9%. For example, it can be music files with different titles or two versions of a movie with different sound tracks. Using the SET protocol, a gigabyte file is divided into 64,000 fragments of 16 kilobytes - all of them are compared and can be downloaded from different sources.

As you know, the more sources of the torrent - the higher the speed. Depending on the number of sources, using SET, the download speed of a file can grow by 5% and 500%. During the tests, the real increase in MP3 download speed was 71%. On the video trailer, the acceleration was 30% due to the swap of information from other trailers, in which 47% of the content matched.

The source code for the development was shown by researchers at the 4th USENIX Symposium on network designs and implementations . Scientists argue that they do not think about commercial success, but simply want to speed up the exchange of scientific documents on P2P.
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The authors of the development are Professor David Andersen from Carnegie Mellon and programmer Michael Kaminsky from Intel Research Pittsburgh. They were assisted by a student Himabinda Pucha.

via EurekAlert