Zero-Day Reconciliation of BitTorrent Users with Their ISPs

Abstract. BitTorrent users and consumer ISPs are often pictured as having opposite interests, with end-users aggressively trying to improve their download times, while ISPs throttle this traffic to reduce their costs. However, inefficiencies in both download time and quantity of long-distance traffic originate in BitTorrent randomly selecting peers to interact with. We show that biasing the link selection allows one to reduce both median download times by up to 32% and long-distance traffic by up to 16%. This optimization can be deployed by modifying only the BitTorrent trackers. No external infrastructure nor specialized client-side software deployment is necessary, thereby facilitating the adoption of our technique.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: EUROPAR
• Authors: Marco Slot, Paolo Costa, Guillaume Pierre, Vivek Rai
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Download Times, EUROPAR 2009, Long-distance Traffic, Long-distance Traffic Originate