Sampling Bias in BitTorrent Measurements

Abstract. Real-world measurements play an important role in understanding the characteristics and in improving the operation of BitTorrent, which is currently a popular Internet application. Much like measuring the Internet, the complexity and scale of the BitTorrent network make a single, complete measurement impractical. While a large number of measurements have already employed diverse sampling techniques to study parts of BitTorrent network, until now there exists no investigation of their sampling bias, that is, of their ability to objectively represent the characteristics of BitTorrent. In this work we present the first study of the sampling bias in BitTorrent measurements. We first introduce a novel taxonomy of sources of sampling bias in BitTorrent measurements. We then investigate the sampling among fifteen long-term BitTorrent measurements completed between 2004 and 2009, and find that different data sources and measurement techniques can lead to significantly different measu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: EUROPAR
• Authors: Boxun Zhang, Alexandru Iosup, Johan A. Pouwelse, Dick H. J. Epema, Henk J. Sips
• Keywords: BitTorrent Measurements, Bittorrent Network, Distributed And Parallel Computing, EUROPAR 2010, Sampling Bias