PEER-TO-PEER CONTENT BROADCAST TRANSFER MECHANISM

A technique for efficiently transferring files in a peer-to-peer network promotes substantially real-time file sharing over the network. Nodes of the network may serve as both clients and servers, such that the file transfer burden in the network is equitably distributed across the nodes of the network, generally ensuring that the fil e dissemination process is executed as quickly as possible. In an embodiment, each node that has or receives a file advertises possession of the file so that other nodes may obtain the file therefrom. in an embodiment, a node may simultaneously receive a file via download from a particular node and serve that same file via upload to another node. Within this embodiment, a generation identifier is preferably associated with each copy of the file to prevent twa nodes, each having only part of a file, from attempting to retrieve the remainder of the file from each other.