Network, Networking Technology, Data Communication Terms, Glossary and Dictionary

Avalanche

Avalanche is the name of a proposed peer-to-peer (P2P) network created by Microsoft, which claims to offer improved scalability and bandwidth efficiency compared to existing P2P systems. Avalanche works in a similar way to BitTorrent, but aims to improve some of the latter's shortfalls. Like BitTorrent, Avalanche splits the file to be distributed into small blocks. However, rather than peers simply transmitting the blocks, they transmit random linear combinations of the blocks along with the random coefficients of this linear combination.

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Avalanche