A Novel Massive Deployment Solution Based on the Peer-to-Peer Protocol

Abstract

The BitTorrent (BT) is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocol that was developed approximately 20 years ago, is becoming increasingly popular, and has been widely accepted. The BT-based mass deployment system can be used to improve performance and scalability that cannot be achieved by the unicasting, broadcasting, and multicasting protocols. However, when the BT-based system is applied in massive deployments, a major issue related to insufficient temporary storage space to store the whole system image before deploying needs to be resolved. Such problems arose because the system is deployed to the disk space, meaning that it cannot be used for temporary storage. Therefore, a novel BT-based solution that can remove the limitations caused by the insufficient temporary storage issue is proposed. The BT-based mass deployment system was designed by using the file system blocks transferring (FSBT) mechanism. The receiver of the FSBT mechanism can obtain the blocks of the file system from other peers. Then, those blocks will be written directly to raw disks or partitions. The sender of the FSBT mechanism can read the blocks of file systems directly from raw disks or partitions. Then, the blocks can be sent to other peers. This approach solves the insufficient temporary storage issue. The novel BT-based mass deployment system was tested and verified for the configuration consisting of at most 32 personal computers (PCs). To demonstrate the achievable performance of the novel BT-based system, comparisons were made between the novel program and the traditional multicast solutions, as well as other solutions for mass deployment. The proposed BT solution can be much faster than the multicast solution when deploying 11 machines or more. The experimental results demonstrated the feasibility and superior performance of the proposed system. Furthermore, performance comparisons of the proposed BT-based mass deployment system versus other solutions demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed solution. In the future, the BT parameters can be further optimized, and the simultaneous read and write features can be implemented to improve the deployment performance. In addition, the BT-based mass deployment system can serve as the basis for the development of other mass deployment systems.