DOT is a transfer service that handles the heavy lifting of data transfer on behalf of client applications such as HTTP, SMTP, or custom applications. DOT centralizes the functions of data transfer so that innovations in transfer techniques can apply both to newly developed applications and to legacy applications.
As a core transfer mechanism within DOT, we have created Similarity-Enhanced Transfer. SET is a multi-source download system that can retrieve pieces of a target file both from identical sources (e.g., mirrors of the file) as well as similar sources (nonidentical files that share bytes with the target file), thereby outperforming contemporary approaches such as BitTorrent. A key advantage of SET is that it detects such similar and identical sources using a constant number of lookups and inserting a constant number of mappings per object into a global lookup table.
Please see the DOT Project Website for more details.
Himabindu Pucha, Michael Kaminsky, David G. Andersen, and Michael A. Kozuch. Adaptive File Transfers for Diverse Environments. In Proceedings of the 2008 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX'08), Boston, MA, June 2008. [PDF]
Himabindu Pucha, David G. Andersen, Michael Kaminsky. Exploiting Similarity for Multi-Source Downloads using File Handprints. In Proceedings of the 4rd Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'07), Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 2007. [PDF]
Niraj Tolia, Michael Kaminsky, David G. Andersen, and Swapnil Patil. DOT: An Architecture for Internet Data Transfer. In Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'06), San Jose, California, May 2006. [PDF]