Despite file distribution applications are responsible for a major portion of the current Internet traffic, so far little effort has been dedicated to study file distribution from the point of view of energy efficiency. In this paper, we present the first extensive and detailed theoretical study for the problem of energy efficiency in file distribution. Specifically, we first demonstrate that the general problem of minimizing energy consumption in file distribution is NP-hard. For restricted versions of the problem, we derive tight lower bounds on energy consumption, and we design a family of algorithms that achieve these bounds. Our results prove that through collaborative p2p schemes up to 50% energy savings are achievable with respect to the best available centralized file distribution scheme. Through simulation, we show that even in heterogeneous settings (e.g., considering network congestion, and link variability across hosts) our collaborative algorithms always achieve significant energy savings with respect to the power consumption of centralized file distribution systems.

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