BTWorld: towards observing the global BitTorrent file-sharing network

Today, the BitTorrent Peer-to-Peer file-sharing network is one of the largest Internet applications--it generates massive traffic volumes, it is deployed in thousands of independent communities, and it serves millions of unique users worldwide. Despite a large number of empirical and theoretical studies, observing the state of the global BitTorrent network remains a grand challenge for the BitTorrent community. To address this challenge, in this work we introduce BTWorld, an architecture for observing the global BitTorrent network without help from the ISPs. We design BTWorld around three main features specific to BitTorrent measurements. First, our architecture is able to find public trackers, that is, the BitTorrent components that offer unrestricted service to peers around the world. Second, by observing the state of these trackers, BTWorld obtains information about the performance, scalability, and reliability of BitTorrent. Third, BTWorld is designed to pre-process the large volu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: HPDC
• Authors: Maciej Wojciechowski, Mihai Capotâ, Johan A. Pouwelse, Alexandru Iosup
• Keywords: BitTorrent Community, BitTorrent Components, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Global Bittorrent Network, HPDC 2010