Avalanche is the name of a proposed peer-to-peer (P2P) network created by Pablo Rodriguez and Christos Gkantsidis at Microsoft, which claims to offer improved scalability and bandwidth efficiency compared to existing P2P systems.
The proposed system works in a similar way to BitTorrent, but aims to improve some of its shortfalls.
This technique removes the need for each peer to have complex knowledge of block distribution across the network (an aspect of BitTorrent-like protocols which the paper[1] claims does not scale very well).
Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, criticized the proposed Avalanche system in a post to his blog.
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