New File Sharing System to Make Downloads Faster

Millions of Internet users around the world will be happy to hear the latest news about file sharing.

A new system has just been developed by U.S. researchers that will greatly increase that speed at which music and movie files can be shared. The best way to share files at the moment are systems such as BitTorrent. This type of file sharing is based on numbers. The more people that are sharing a movie or music file the faster someone can download it.

The new system takes file sharing to a new level. It is called Similarity Enhanced Transfer otherwise called SET. SET goes out a finds files that are identical or pretty much identical to the file being downloaded. The researchers who developed SET claim that this new file sharing system can increased downloads speeds by up to 500 percent of what can be done on current peer-to-peer sharing technology: torrents.

The study was presented in a paper by Intel researcher, Michael Kaminsky, David Anderson from Carnegie Mellon University and Himabindu Pucha fron Purdue University.

SET is capable of increasing the amount of sources available for a requested file as it can actually find other files that match. The results in potentially much faster download speeds.

The full report detailing SET and the systems code was introduced yesterday in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the '4th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation'.

One of the researchers, David Anderson, said, "This is a technique that I would like people to steal." Anderson and his colleagues have no intention of using the code themselves but would like developers of peer-to-peer systems that do share movies and music to take the code and use it. He also said, "It would make P2P transfers faster ad more efficient, and developers should just take the idea and use it in their own systems."

When he went on to discuss the peer-to-peer file-sharing phenomenon, Anderson said, "In some sense, the promise of P2P has been greater than the reality." He believes that the new way of creating more source should help ease the backup that occurs because Internet service providers allow much less upload bandwidth than they allow download bandwidth. This make the system unbalanced and does not allow peer-to-peer sharing to work to its best.

SET will be most helpful when users are trying to download more rare files that may have very few sharers. SET will be able to identify similar files on the Internet and added these to the sources and hopefully increase the download speed.

David Anderson has said that he will put the code for the SET system online. This link to this code can be found in the resources section of this new story.

Sources
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6544919.stm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070410162520.htm
http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/04/scientists_jump.html