Anyone out there researching or are into on P2P protocols, grid/distributed computing? You might want to check out this Microsoft Research project - "Avalanche".

From Avalanche Project on MSR
" Existing Peer-Assisted file delivery systems use swarming techniques to simultaneously obtain different pieces of a file from multiple nodes. One problem of such systems is that as the number of receivers increases it becomes harder to do optimal scheduling of pieces to nodes. One possible solution is to use a heuristic that prioritizes exchanges of "locally rarest" pieces. But such local-rarest policies often fail to identify the "globally rarest" piece since peers have a limited view of the network. The end result is slower downloads, stalled transfers, etc.

The Avalanche model fixes these problems using network coding. Instead of distributing the blocks of the file, peers produce linear combinations of the blocks they already hold. Such combinations are distributed together with a tag that describes the parameters in the combination. Any peer can generate new unique combinations from the combinations it already has. When a peer has enough independent combinations, it can decode and build the original file."

Alternatively, you can also download their research publications here.
Network Coding for Large Scale Content Distribution (pdf) and P2P Content Distribution (ppt)