Improving BitTorrent's Peer Selection For Multimedia Content On-Demand Delivery

TL;DR

This paper proposes QBPS, an adaptation of BitTorrent's peer selection, to improve multimedia on-demand delivery by reducing startup delay and enhancing throughput, validated through simulations showing significant performance gains.

Contribution

Introduces QBPS, a novel peer selection strategy for BitTorrent tailored for multimedia on-demand, with validation demonstrating superior throughput and QoS improvements.

Findings

QBPS achieves up to 48% throughput improvement in low-capacity scenarios.

Simulation results show QBPS outperforms existing peer selection methods.

QBPS effectively reduces startup delay and ensures smoother playback.

Abstract

The great efficiency achieved by the BitTorrent protocol for the distribution of large amounts of data inspired its adoption to provide multimedia content on-demand delivery over the Internet. As it is not designed for this purpose, some adjustments have been proposed in order to meet the related QoS requirements like low startup delay and smooth playback continuity. Accordingly, this paper introduces a BitTorrent-like proposal named as Quota-Based Peer Selection (QBPS). This proposal is mainly based on the adaptation of the original peer-selection policy of the BitTorrent protocol. Its validation is achieved by means of simulations and competitive analysis. The final results show that QBPS outperforms other recent proposals of the literature. For instance, it achieves a throughput optimization of up to 48.0% in low-provision capacity scenarios where users are very interactive.