With the explosive growth of data-concentrated applications over Internet, the distribution of huge data in large scales with guarantee of Quality of Service (QoS), remains an elusive goal in both current and future Internet. The potential integration of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) paradigm into the Internet content distribution infrastructure provides a disruptive market opportunity to scale the Internet for higher quality data delivery. While the theoretical benefits of P2P has been widely reported, it remains unknown on its performance for mass data delivery over the booming Internet with increasing users and access speed, highly promising yet controversial. This paper thus provides an experimental study in exploring the following questions: I) How fast and how scalable the mass data delivery can be with the assistance of P2P networks? 2) What are the bottlenecks in adopting P2P for content distribution in high-speed networks? 3) How could P2P be integrated as a reliable platform for QoS-guaranteed data delivery among dedicated server farms in industry? Our explorations quantify the unique strength of P2P technology for mass data delivery in high-speed networks, and identify factors that influence the downloading time of end users, namely, peer upload rate, file piece size, and seed capacity.
