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The ability of a P2P network to scale its throughput up in proportion to the arrival rate of peers has recently been shown to be crucially dependent on the chunk sharing policy employed. Some policies can result in low frequencies of a particular chunk, known as the missing chunk syndrome, which can dramatically reduce throughput and lead to instability of the system. For instance, commonly used policies that nominally “boost” the sharing of infrequent chunks such as the well-known rarest-first algorithm have been shown to be unstable. We take a complementary viewpoint, and instead consider a policy that simply prevents the sharing of the most frequent chunk(s), that we call mode-suppression. We also consider a more general version that suppresses the mode only if the mode frequency is larger than the lowest frequency by a fixed threshold. We prove the stability of mode-suppression using Lyapunov techniques, and use a Kingman bound argument to show that the total download time does not increase with peer arrival rate. We then design versions of mode-suppression that sample a small number of peers at each time, and construct noisy mode estimates by aggregating these samples over time. We show numerically that mode suppression stabilizes and outperforms all other recently proposed chunk sharing algorithms, and via integration into BitTorrent implementation operating over the ns-3 that it ensures stable, low sojourn time operation in a real-world setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Timely reception of information is of utmost importance in many cyber-physical systems. We study timely status update schemes for a single source. We consider a scheme which exploits the temporal correlation in source messages to send differential information to the receiver, over an unreliable channel. In this scheme, the source sends the true state information, interleaved with differential messages. We observe that the differential encoding improves the timeliness performance even in the absence of feedback, if the codeword lengths for both differential and true messages are chosen judiciously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-time decision making relies on the availability of accurate data and, therefore, delivering status updates in a timely fashion is of paramount importance. The topic of real-time status updates has received much attention in recent years. This article contributes new results to this research area by studying the interplay between average timeliness and design decisions made at the physical layer, for unreliable communication channels. Specifically, this study explores the tension between the fact that more reliable transmissions with lower probabilities of decoding failure tend to improve timely delivery, unless these improvements come at the expense of significantly longer codewords. The average timeliness is adopted as an evaluation criterion, and a framework to efficiently compute the performance of various transmission schemes for the binary erasure channel is developed. We show that the average timeliness decreases as we increase the feedback rate in a hybrid ARQ scheme for a range of codeword lengths. This article also provides design guidelines for the codeword length selection for an hybrid ARQ scheme to improve the average information timeliness. Numerical examples are included to further illustrate the applicability of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]