Clustering and Sharing Incentives in BitTorrent Systems
Arnaud Legout (INRIA Sophia Antipolis / INRIA Rh\^one-Alpes), Nikitas, Liogkas, Eddie Kohler, Lixia Zhang

TL;DR
This study experimentally investigates BitTorrent's peer selection, validating key properties like peer clustering and sharing incentives, and offers practical guidelines for seed provisioning and protocol improvements.
Contribution
First experimental validation of BitTorrent's peer clustering and sharing incentives, with insights into seed provisioning and protocol enhancements.
Findings
Peers tend to cluster by bandwidth in BitTorrent
BitTorrent's choking algorithm ensures uniform service in seed state
Underprovisioned seeds reduce clustering and sharing incentives
Abstract
Peer-to-peer protocols play an increasingly instrumental role in Internet content distribution. Consequently, it is important to gain a full understanding of how these protocols behave in practice and how their parameters impact overall performance. We present the first experimental investigation of the peer selection strategy of the popular BitTorrent protocol in an instrumented private torrent. By observing the decisions of more than 40 nodes, we validate three BitTorrent properties that, though widely believed to hold, have not been demonstrated experimentally. These include the clustering of similar-bandwidth peers, the effectiveness of BitTorrent's sharing incentives, and the peers' high average upload utilization. In addition, our results show that BitTorrent's new choking algorithm in seed state provides uniform service to all peers, and that an underprovisioned initial seed…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPeer-to-Peer Network Technologies · Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Caching and Content Delivery
