1. Turning the net into a single data cloud
swift
Turning the net into a single data cloud
Jari Ahola
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland J
7th Networked Media Systems Concertation Meeting, FMN Cluster, April 14th, 2011,Trento, Italy

2. Background
Current internet protocols were designed for 1:1 client-server communication
Internet is increasingly a video network
TCP is a complex protocol (60k lines of code)
BitTorrent is even more complex (90k lines of code) running at application level

3. swift – the multiparty transport protocol
swift’s mission is to disseminate content among a swarm of peers.
swift expands the TCP/IP protocol suite with swarming.
Designed to be capable of integration into browsers or operating systems and is able to serve 95% of current Internet traffic.
It might be understood as BitTorrent at the transport layer.

4. swift - design
Entirely drops TCP's abstraction of sequential reliable data stream delivery: for swift this is redundant.
Being implemented over UDP, the protocol does its best to make every datagram self-contained.
Pruning of unneeded functions and aggressive layer collapsing greatly simplifies the protocol.
The protocol was built around the abstraction of atomic datagrams: once received, a datagram is either immediately discarded or permanently accepted, ready to be forwarded to other peers.
To avoid a multilayered request/acknowledgement system, where every layer basically does the same but for bigger chunks of data, swift employs a scale- independent acknowledgement/request system, where data is measured by aligned power-of-2 intervals (so called bins).
swift builds Merkle hash trees down to every single packet (1KB of data).

5. LEDBAT – congestion control
swift yields to TCP

6. swift – Wikipedia integration
Distribution of Wikipedia video content

7. swift – Wikipedia integration
Browser integration

8. swift – available now 4,000 lines of cross-platform C++ code
The libswift library is licensed under LGPL; it runs on Mac OS X, Windows and a variety of Unices
Created by the P2P-Next project under grant in FP7