Leveraging the SCION Internet Architecture to Accelerate File Transfers over BitTorrent

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach using the SCION Internet architecture to enhance BitTorrent file transfers by enabling multipath communication and intelligent path selection, resulting in significant throughput improvements.

Contribution

It presents a new method integrating SCION with BitTorrent to optimize data flow through multipath and disjoint path selection, outperforming traditional BGP-based methods.

Findings

48% increase in goodput over BGP

33% increase in goodput over BGP-M

Effective traffic flow improvement with few outgoing connections

Abstract

As the needs of Internet users and applications significantly changed over the last decade, inter-domain routing became more important to fulfill these needs. The ways how data flows over the Internet are still completely in the hand of network operators, who optimize traffic according to their own, local view of the network. We observe two potential limitations from this: Optimizing according to the local view may a) result in unused capacities in the global network and b) not meet the actual needs of users and applications. To identify and overcome these limitations, we present our BitTorrent over SCION approach, which enables multipath communication and intelligent path selection for endhosts in global torrent networks. We compare our implementation against BitTorrent over BGP and BGP-M in a small-scale Internet topology, observing an increase in goodput of 48% through multipathing compared to BitTorrent over BGP and 33% compared to the BGP-M candidate. Furthermore, we show that our proposed disjoint path selection algorithm is able to improve traffic flow in the network with a low number of outgoing connections to unchoked peers.