Collabory: A Collaborative Throughput Stabilizer & Accelerator for P2P Protocols

Common peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing clients usually download at an unstable rate and hardly exploit the available bandwidth offered by low rate sources. The characteristic fluctuational throughput of the source peers might be caused by user behavior factors such as running other bandwidth consuming tasks, throttling of download speed by P2P software or even termination of the source.In this paper we propose Collabory - a solution for stabilizing and accelerating the download speed rate in existing P2P networks. We introduce a new role: "feeders" - peers that collaboratively aggregate the downloads from multiple sources into a single, stable stream served to the downloading peer. We show that the solution utilizes source nodes with an extremely low and unstable throughput without reducing the download rate of the downloading peer.Measurements in a test suite expressed a major increase in download rate and stability. Upgraded & stabilized throughput is demonstrated on eMule.