Performance analysis of peer-to-peer storage systems

This paper evaluates the performance of two schemes for recovering lost data in a peer-to-peer (P2P) storage systems. The first scheme is centralized and relies on a server that recovers multiple losses at once, whereas the second one is distributed. By representing the state of each scheme by an absorbing Markov chain, we are able to compute their performance in terms of the delivered data lifetime and data availability. Numerical computations are provided to better illustrate the impact of each system parameter on the performance. Depending on the context considered, we provide guidelines on how to tune the system parameters in order to provide a desired data lifetime.