Games - Avalanche

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	Games - Avalanche

Avalanche is the name of a proposed peer-to-peer (P2P) network created by Microsoft, which claims to offer improved scalability and bandwidth efficiency compared to existing P2P systems.

The proposed system works in a similar way to BitTorrent, but aims to improve some of the latter's shortfalls. Like BitTorrent, Avalanche splits the file to be distributed into small blocks. However, rather than peers simply transmitting the blocks, they transmit random linear combinations of the blocks along with the random coefficients of this linear combination - a technique known as 'network coding'. This technique removes the need for each peer to have complex knowledge of block distribution across the network (an aspect of BitTorrent-like protocols which the paper claims does not scale very well).

Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, discussed the proposed Avalanche system in a post to his , which mentions some of its potential drawbacks. He also mentions the Microsoft research paper's inaccuracies in the analysis of the BitTorrent protocol (some of the analysis in the paper being based on a version of the BitTorrent protocol, which is several years out-of-date), as well as concerns about the proposed network coding being too resource-intensive to be practical.

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