Overlay connection usage in BitTorrent swarms

  • Authors:
  • Simon Oechsner;Frank Lehrieder;Dirk Staehle

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Würzburg, Institute of Computer Science, Germany;University of Würzburg, Institute of Computer Science, Germany;University of Würzburg, Institute of Computer Science, Germany

  • Venue:
  • ETM'10 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Incentives, overlays, and economic traffic control
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The amount of peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic and its inefficient utilization of network resources make it a high priority for traffic management. Due to the distributed nature of P2P overlays, a promising approach for a management scheme is to change the client behavior and its utilization of overlay connections. However, from the viewpoint of a client, there are different categories of overlay connections. In this paper, we discern between these different types of overlay connections in BitTorrent, the currently most popular P2P file-sharing application. A simulation study of BitTorrent and a video-streaming derivate called Tribler provides insights into the usage of these types of connections for data exchange. Thus, traffic management based on client behavior can be optimized by efficiently targeting connections which carry the most traffic. We also show the implications of these results for locality-awareness mechanisms such as Biased Neighbor Selection and Biased Unchoking.