SatTorrent - Satellite-Aided P2P Content Distribution for Virtual Environments

Distributed virtual environments and their most prominent representative massive multiplayer online games enjoy a high and still growing popularity. The distribution of client updates is a challenging task already and will become much worse when users are allowed to apply extensive changes respectively additions to the virtual world by means of user generated content. This paper presents a satellite based peer-to-peer approach that is able to reduce the download duration, server load, overall traffic and thus the costs involved with the content distribution. In order to achieve this, SatTorrent - a modification of the BitTorrent protocol - has been developed which is presented and evaluated in this paper.