Can Realistic BitTorrent Experiments Be Performed on Clusters?

TL;DR

This study shows that network latency and packet loss have minimal impact on BitTorrent download times, supporting the use of dedicated clusters for realistic and reproducible experiments.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that dedicated clusters can effectively simulate realistic network conditions for BitTorrent experiments, with minimal impact on download times.

Findings

Less than 15% increase in download time with increased latency and packet loss.

Network conditions have marginal impact on BitTorrent performance.

Dedicated clusters are suitable for realistic, reproducible experiments.

Abstract

Network latency and packet loss are considered to be an important requirement for realistic evaluation of Peer-to-Peer protocols. Dedicated clusters, such as Grid'5000, do not provide the variety of network latency and packet loss rates that can be found in the Internet. However, compared to the experiments performed on testbeds such as PlanetLab, the experiments performed on dedicated clusters are reproducible, as the computational resources are not shared. In this paper, we perform experiments to study the impact of network latency and packet loss on the time required to download a file using BitTorrent. In our experiments, we observe a less than 15% increase on the time required to download a file when we increase the round-trip time between any two peers, from 0 ms to 400 ms, and the packet loss rate, from 0% to 5%. Our main conclusion is that the underlying network latency and packet loss have a marginal impact on the time required to download a file using BitTorrent. Hence, dedicated clusters such as Grid'5000 can be safely used to perform realistic and reproducible BitTorrent experiments.