An Empirical Study on Content Bundling in BitTorrent Swarming System

Despite the tremendous success of BitTorrent, its swarming system suffers from a fundamental limitation: lower or no availability of unpopular contents. Recently, Menasche et al. has shown that bundling 1 is a promising solution to mitigate this availability problem; it improves the availability and reduces download times for unpopular contents by combining multiple files into a single swarm. There also have been studies on bundling strategies and performance issues in bundled swarms. Despite the recent surge of interest in the benefits of and strategies for bundling, there are still little empirical grounding for understanding, describing, and modeling it. This is the first empirical study that measure and analyze how prevalent contents bundling is in BitTorrent and how peers access the bundled contents, in comparison to the other non-bundled (i.e., single-filed) ones. To our surprise, we found that around 70% of BitTorrent swarms contain multiple files, which indicate that bundling ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Jinyoung Han, Taejoong Chung, Seungbae Kim, Hyunchul Kim, Ted "Taekyoung" Kwon, Yanghee Choi
• Keywords: Availability, CORR 2010, Education, Multiple Files, Unpopular Contents