An Analysis of BitTorrent Cross-Swarm Peer Participation and Geolocational Distribution

TL;DR

This paper analyzes BitTorrent swarms for popular pirated TV shows, examining peer distribution, temporal trends, and cross-swarm participation to inform network planning and understand P2P content sharing dynamics.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of peer participation and geolocational distribution in BitTorrent swarms for pirated TV shows, with high-frequency data collection exceeding 2 terabytes.

Findings

Significant cross-swarm peer participation observed

Geolocational distribution varies across regions

Temporal trends show fluctuations in swarm size

Abstract

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing is becoming increasingly popular in recent years. In 2012, it was reported that P2P traffic consumed over 5,374 petabytes per month, which accounted for approximately 20.5% of consumer internet traffic. TV is the popular content type on The Pirate Bay (the world's largest BitTorrent indexing website). In this paper, an analysis of the swarms of the most popular pirated TV shows is conducted. The purpose of this data gathering exercise is to enumerate the peer distribution at different geolocational levels, to measure the temporal trend of the swarm and to discover the amount of cross-swarm peer participation. Snapshots containing peer related information involved in the unauthorised distribution of this content were collected at a high frequency resulting in a more accurate landscape of the total involvement. The volume of data collected throughout the monitoring of the network exceeded 2 terabytes. The presented analysis and the results presented can aid in network usage prediction, bandwidth provisioning and future network design.