IPv6, Multicast/Anycast, and Bittorrent

[soccerballtux]

I've been reading a bit on IPv6 and multicast, and been thinking.......multicast could end our bittorrent woes. People wouldn't have to share more than 1-2% of the file for everyone on the torrent to get it. This would put to death any worries ISP's have about high upload costs.

If I can send 90KB/s of data, and I can send it to 275 other people with, say a few extra headers totalling 15KB at most...then so many more people could benefit from uploading. This would really remove any monetary reason for banning bittorrent...and since there are plenty of legitimate uses like Linux and porn [jk], I bet it would be safe from angry politicians, too.

 

[m1ldslide1]

Multicast is a very configurable protocol, and in order for that to work you'd have to have every router on the internet participating in the same multicast PIM-SM type environment with shared trees being created for every last source and receiver. In other words, it would never happen - even multicast has some management overhead, and what you're talking about would be extremely off-the-charts resource intensive. Not to mention that the internet is a collection of indepedent carriers and providers, in other words, they would never and should never participate in the same "network". They all run their own routing protocols and summarize routes via BGP to eachother, from what I understand. In other words, traffic can pass between them, but they are completely autonomous from each other.

All that said, multicast does wonders on a LAN. Taking several independent unicast conversations and reducing them to a single multicast tree is vital when it comes to streaming video and other resource intensive apps.

Probably belongs in Networking... THat could explain why this thread has no responses.