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Peer-assisted content delivery networks have recently emerged as an economically viable alternative to traditional content delivery approaches: the feasibility studies conducted for several large content providers suggested a remarkable potential of peer-assisted content delivery networks to reduce the burden of user requests on content delivery servers and several commercial peer-assisted deployments have been recently introduced. Yet there are many technical and commercial challenges which question the future of peer-assisted solutions in industrial settings. This includes among others unreliability of peer-to-peer networks, the lack of incentives for peers’ participation, and copyright issues. In this paper, we carefully review and systematize this ongoing debate around the future of peer-assisted networks and propose a novel taxonomy to characterize the research and industrial efforts in the area.

To this end …