If I close my eyes hard enough, I can remember the days when p2p meant one-to-one by default.
Despite it being established for nearly a decade, I still marvel at the quantum leap that is torrent distribution.
Which makes me wonder, and Wikipedia doesn’t address this, can there be a better way? I’m talking on a theoretical basis here… is anything possibly faster than the torrent method for distributing files to a massive network? Or has Bram Cohen basically won the Internetz?
(Feel free to relocate this to a different exchange if it doesn’t fit best here…)
A quick research paper I found online points out in the introduction some reasons why BitTorrent is so successful compared to other P2P architectures including the Tit-For-Tat (TFT) mechanism where by nodes/users preferable upload more to nodes/user that they can download from (this is the hope anyway). There are many other reasons why BitTorrent is so popular including: reliability due it’s distributed nature (much like the internet itself); Speed and Scalability.
However I think theoretically it’s not weather something is going to be better than BitTorrent but instead as this research paper proves there can be improvements made:
Analyzing and Improving BitTorrent Performance
Hope this helps and if you find any research papers post them back please