Pushing BitTorrent Locality to the Limit

TL;DR

This paper investigates the limits of P2P locality in BitTorrent, demonstrating that high locality can drastically reduce inter-ISP traffic by up to 40% without harming download times, through extensive experiments and new mechanisms.

Contribution

The paper introduces two simple mechanisms to enhance locality in BitTorrent and evaluates their impact on traffic reduction and download performance at large scale.

Findings

High locality can reduce inter-ISP traffic by up to 40%.

Proposed mechanisms enable high locality without increasing download times.

Experiments with 10,000 clients validate the effectiveness of the approaches.

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) locality has recently raised a lot of interest in the community. Indeed, whereas P2P content distribution enables financial savings for the content providers, it dramatically increases the traffic on inter-ISP links. To solve this issue, the idea to keep a fraction of the P2P traffic local to each ISP was introduced a few years ago. Since then, P2P solutions exploiting locality have been introduced. However, several fundamental issues on locality still need to be explored. In particular, how far can we push locality, and what is, at the scale of the Internet, the reduction of traffic that can be achieved with locality? In this paper, we perform extensive experiments on a controlled environment with up to 10,000 BitTorrent clients to evaluate the impact of high locality on inter-ISP links traffic and peers download completion time. We introduce two simple mechanisms that make high locality possible in challenging scenarios and we show that we save up to several orders of magnitude inter-ISP traffic compared to traditional locality without adversely impacting peers download completion time. In addition, we crawled 214,443 torrents representing 6,113,224 unique peers spread among 9,605 ASes. We show that whereas the torrents we crawled generated 11.6 petabytes of inter-ISP traffic, our locality policy implemented for all torrents could have reduced the global inter-ISP traffic by up to 40%.