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Dissecting BitTorrent: Five Months in a Torrent’s Lifetime

2004; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-540-24668-8_1

1611-3349

Mikel Izal, Guillaume Urvoy-Keller, Ernst W. Biersack, Pascal Felber, Anwar Al Hamra, Luis Garcés-Erice,

Advanced Data Storage Technologies

Popular content such as software updates is requested by a large number of users. Traditionally, to satisfy a large number of requests, lager server farms or mirroring are used, both of which are expensive. An inexpensive alternative are peer-to-peer based replication systems, where users who retrieve the file, act simultaneously as clients and servers. In this paper, we study BitTorrent, a new and already very popular peer-to-peer application that allows distribution of very large contents to a large set of hosts. Our analysis of BitTorrent is based on measurements collected on a five months long period that involved thousands of peers. We assess the performance of the algorithms used in BitTorrent through several metrics. Our conclusions indicate that BitTorrent is a realistic and inexpensive alternative to the classical server-based content distribution.