Global stability of Peer-to-Peer file sharing systems

A lot of recent research has been focusing on the steady state performance of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. However, it is not yet clear to us whether the steady state of a P2P system always exists. In this paper, we study the stability issue of P2P file sharing systems. We use a simple fluid model to analyze BitTorrent-like P2P file sharing networks. The resulting fluid model is a switched linear system and we prove that such a system is always globally stable. We also provide numerical results based on extensive simulations.